One Month of Pura Vida: Al principio

     ¡Hola! Cómo van? Pura Vida I hope. That is a typical response here when people are asked about their day, but I will probably do another blog just about that phrase. Although I never posted anything about it, I arrived here in San José on Saturday, June 3rd, and I have been learning new things ever since.

San José, the city where we are living, is the capital of Costa Rica and was named in honor of Joseph of Nazareth, Jesus's earthly father. The city, including the metropolitan area, has a population of over one million people. I have not explored a lot of city, unless it was by accident because of getting lost, but I hope to see more of it as time goes on.

     So far, since arriving, I have had the chance to hang out and talk with my host family about places to go, things to do or not do, and just about life in general. They are really nice people, and even though I do not always understand everything they say, they try to make sure that I can understand most of it. They also speak a decent amount of English, which is nice if I am ever totally confused.

     I have also had classes this past Monday through today. Every week, we have classes from 9 AM to 2 PM on Mondays through Thursdays, but we have a fifteen minute break in the morning and an hour for lunch at noon. On our first day, we had to come in at 8 to take an oral placement test, and then we could know what classes to take. For our classes, there are normally anywhere between 2 to 6 students in a class with one teacher, and the things that can be covered in the class vary greatly. I am in one of the intermediate classes, and we have talked about past tense verbs, Latin American legends, religion, and so many more things. Our teacher is a lot of fun, and we always laugh during class.

     Besides class, we have also had to learn how to use the public transportation here. I was pretty confident in myself in this aspect because I have used public transportation in just about every country I have gone to. But here it is a little different. The main mode of public transportation is buses, but the buses are actually privately owned and not owned by the government. And although they have certain spots they can stop at, you have to let them know to stop because they will not do it if no one signals for it. They also will not pick you up at the bus stop if you do not wave them down first. That has taken a little bit of time to get used to because you have to know how to signal enough for them to come, but you also have to know how and when to signal for them to stop. If you are wanting a bus to pick you up, you just have to stick your hand out and it should stop. And for getting it to stop at the next bus stop, the bus either has a string to pull or buttons to press that alert the drivers. And do not even get me started on how people drive here; to say the least, it is absolutely terrifying! I might have to do a separate blog about that as well.

     Finally, the last thing we have had to learn is how to get around the city when not on a bus. It is hard here to figure out where you want to go because many of the streets do not have street names and there are not really addresses to search in Google maps. The second day of class, my roommate and I had to go to the school by ourselves, because our Mama Tica (our host mom) showed us how to get there the first day. We got to the bus alright, we got on the bus, and we got to our correct stop. But when we tried finding the school, we turned too soon and missed the correct street by about 40 feet. And then we proceeded to wander around the area for about 40 minutes until some nice guy we asked for directions let us use his phone to Google maps our school so we could know how to get there. Neither of us had wifi, and we did not know where on a map the school was. But we asked so many people that morning if they knew where the school was and most just said they were not from San José, or they had not heard of our school. We were late to class, but it was at least we were together and it was a funny story to tell. Then after class that day, we went with one of the girls from UNK and her roommate to her house so if we wanted to do something with her, we could walk or take a taxi over so she would not have to walk alone. And after we went to her house, we went to the market to get some food so we did not have to eat out for lunch every day (We have breakfast and supper provided by our host family). But on our way back home from the market, we again turned down a wrong street and had to ask more people for help. Thankfully, people had a decent idea how to get to our neighborhood, so that made things a little bit easier. But it gets dark here by 6 PM at the latest, so that makes it difficult to walk around at night. We have not gotten lost since (knock on wood) so hopefully we will do better now.

This is what we are supposed to give taxi drivers so they know how to get to our house. It is basically just set of directions based on landmarks.

It has been a fun and interesting almost full week here so far, and I have enjoyed trying new things and learning how to live in a big city. We are going to Jaco, which is a town near the beach, today and will stay there until Saturday. And then on Sunday, we are going to go ziplining in the rainforest somewhere. It will be amazing and I will probably blog about this weekend once we get back from everything. ¡Hasta luego!