This week was my first week of classes! After having an eight week break, I was pretty ready to have a set schedule for a semester. This week was sort of a "try-out" week where we got to sign up for a bunch of classes and add and drop them as we needed to. I think by now my classes are pretty set (hopefully). This week was probably the hardest week I've had so far. It was a week where I saw a not-so-nice side of the college-aged ticos. The classes here at UNA are very much based off of group projects which I was somewhat looking forward to because that would give me even more exposure to Spanish and with people my own age. However, every time we went to form our groups nobody wanted to be in a group with any of us Americans. In one of my classes there were 2 other girls from my group. There was a 45 minute fight going on between everyone in the class over who had to work with us while the three of us just sat in the back of the class. Little did any of them know that we are all excellent students who worked very hard to be here. We all decided that that class was not for us and went to drop it immediately after. Due to this not fun week, we made numerous runs to Pops, our favorite ice cream place. Seriously, the employees know us now :)
Other than the stress of the first week of school, my week was really good. Every day I came home for lunch and vented to my host mom and sister about the mean kids at school and then I hung out with friends in the evenings. We went out for pizza one night and the mall for some retail therapy.
One really awesome thing I did this week was getting involved with a volunteer opportunity. A bunch of people from my group and I are now a part of an organization called Proyecto Jovenes Embajadores. Through this organization, we will be helping teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 in many different ways. It's basically a group of students who all want to play soccer. But in order to play soccer they are required to do community service and take English classes. So that's where the volunteers come in. Three to four times a month one of my friends who is also an education major and I will be in our own classroom teaching English. I am SO excited about this. We have a lot of girls in our group which is really good for this program because right now they only have boys. The reason for this is because they have only had male volunteers and so the girls all dropped out. Hopefully we will be able to get the girls involved again. The guys who started this program took us all out to dinner and we figured out our schedules and he gave us the lesson plans for each week. I'm so happy I have the opportunity to volunteer with such an awesome organization while I'm here.
Once this crazy week was over, we headed straight for the beach. Friday morning at 9AM we got on our first bus from Heredia to San Jose. From there we really had no idea what we were doing which was kind of scary but mostly just really funny. We just walked around until we found where the cabs line up. We all got into a cab and told them to take us to the bus station where the bus leaves for Jaco, Costa Rica. He dropped us off and we bought our bus tickets (for only $4!). We had to wait around for about two hours so a couple of my friends and I walked around to find a snack. Of course, we ended up in an ice cream shop before 11 AM. Not surprising at all. We finally got on the bus and were headed for the beach! It seemed like every other minute the temperature inside the bus rose. It was so hot by the time we got there. In Jaco, it is 100 degrees every single day. AND extremely humid. Great combination. When we got off the bus, we really didn't know where we were going yet again. But, we asked for directions and found our hostel without any problems other than the fact that we were dripping sweat. We walked in, set our stuff down, got some lunch at Subway, and headed to the beach. It was only about a 2 minute walk. The beach in Jaco is really pretty. The sand is really dark and the water is beautiful. There were a lot palm trees too. This beach was really not crowded at all which was really nice.
We were there until the sun set.
Day two at the beach was a day of much regret. We went out there around 11 AM and were there until around 4. Little did any of us know we were being burned. Really badly. We put on sunscreen in the morning and re-applied a couple times but apparently that is not good enough for the Costa Rican sun. We walked back in much pain and covered ourselves in aloe. So a note to all my family coming to visit: Do not underestimate the sun here. It is intense.
For dinner, a group of four of us went to a taco place. I got fish tacos with a coconut sauce. They were so good and so tropical. After dinner we went to a gelato place (YUM) and then went home and hung out in the pool for the remainder of the night.
Aside from the crazy sunburns we got, beach weekend #1 was definitely a success :)
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