primer dia de la escuela

What I'm doing: Yesterday was my first day of classes! I had Spanish and History/Culture yesterday. I am in the lower level Spanish class, which I was a little sad about at first, but it will be much easier for me to understand everything. I told my host sister that, and she said "Your Spanish is so good, why are you in the lower level?!" which made me feel a little bit better. :) My Spanish teacher is hilarious. We spend the first part of class talking about ourselves. She would ask us different questions like if you were an animal, what animal would you be? And we also talked about when we see a guy walking down the street, what is the first thing you notice about him? Our teacher told us all about how she loves black guys! I could not stop laughing during class; we were having so much fun.

History/Culture class is more lecture based, so it is not as exciting as Spanish. Our teacher is so enthusiastic and clearly loves to teach about Costa Rica.

Last night my host mom and I went to the store to buy fruit. I love outings like these with my family. She had a special bag to put her fruit in that we dropped on our way to the market. We went back to look at it, and it was gone already! Someone had taken it... My host mom was very sad because it had been her mom's bag. It's crazy because if we had been in the US in my neighborhood, someone would have ran after me saying, "oh you dropped your bag!" But that is not the case here in Costa Rica.

My host family are the nicest people in the world. They are so sweet, and I feel incredibly blessed to have been placed with them. Here's a picture of my host mom and I. :)

Today we were given our assignments for our service learning project. Service learning is a 3 credit course because we are also doing a research project for it. Sydney and I are partners, therefore we were placed in the same place. Some students are working in preschools, others are working in public health centers. Sydney and I are in a bilingual high school. It is perfect since we both want to be teachers!

This afternoon we had our first ecology class. The professor is new, young, and equally funny as my Spanish teacher. He mostly spoke to us in English today, and he said that we would ease our way into Spanish. I have not taken any science classes since highschool, so hopefully I will understand what we are talking about. The course will be focused on sustainability, which was one of my favorite things we talked about in Envi Sci during high school. We are going to a forest this weekend for a fieldtrip, which will be fun.

Does anyone have any questions they were wondering about Costa Rica?

Con mucho amor.