1st Day of classes

Today was the first day of classes. I got into every class I signed up for! Every morning, Monday through Friday I take a four hour long Spanish class. I surprisingly placed into Intermediate 1, so it is a challenge to keep up with my professor. It is also difficult to constantly transition between English and Spanish for my classes, host family, friends, and other interactions. After Spanish in the mornings, I am taking three elective classes in English. Today, I had Intercultural Communications and Competence and Tropical Ecology. Both of my electives seem really fun. The ecology class also includes two overnight field trips!

This is the view out of the window of one of my classrooms. All of my classes except Ecology have a beautiful view of the mountains surrounding San Jose which is situated in a valley. Luckily, I get to study a lot of the Ecology outside anyway.

I am quickly making friends, which is especially important because I do not have any housemates. This makes it a bit more challenging to find people to walk home with during the day and at night, but luckily I am quickly meeting the students that live in the houses around me. In fact, several of the students live in a homestay where their Senora is the mother of my host mother.

After getting lost yesterday, I figured nothing else could go wrong, but I managed to lock myself inside my house. Fortunately, my host mom was just a phone call away. All of the houses here are surrounded by gates with razor wire on top. There is a locked gate and door in order to enter my house, but I did not realize that it also locked from the inside.

 My host mother made breakfast for me this morning which included eggs, toast, bananas, and juice. I found it interesting that my family keeps the eggs in a basket on top of the refrigerator instead of inside it... it seems to work though.  For lunch I had to fend for myself, and I decided to try a burrito vendor on campus. Despite the fact that I am a picky eater, it was very good. For dinner, I just had tacos and tortilla chip while watching a bit of the Sugar bowl in Spanish and a bit of Shrek too.