First off, welcome to the Class of 2016. I will see you in the spring, but for now I am finally here in San Jose, Costa Rica! The total time traveled from Portland to Houston to San Jose was about 11 hour, including layovers.
For people who have studied abroad, they probably have seen something along the lines of the graph below.
I am definitely in the honeymoon stage right now and hope to continue to be there for a long while. As we were descending into the San Jose airport, I saw the vast amounts of forests and it started hitting me that I am going to be in there in a matter of days.
The first order of business when I got off the plane was to go to a cell phone provider in order to purchase a SIM card in order to be able to call home so my parents knew I had made it safely. Getting through customs though definitely was a long process but afterwards I was greeted by the program director with a sign that had “CIEE” on it. I met with others that have arrived a little bit earlier and those that were on the same flight as me that I didn’t know about. Soon we took a taxi into San Jose to our hotel.
A couple of us walked around the city after we ate lunch and we soon learned that automobiles here do not wait for pedestrians.
Classes officially started the first full day we were here in Costa Rica. This is a biology program so classes on this program are a little less traditional in the fact that we are out in the field a lot. The classes we take are: Tropical Diversity, Tropical Ecology, Human in the Tropics, an independent project, and a Spanish course.
As part of Tropical Diversity, we were sent out to the market with a picture of a fruit found in Costa Rica. We had to identify the fruit, find out the season it grows in, and its uses in Spanish. After a lecture on flowers and fruits, we presented our fruits to everyone and afterwards sampled them all. Guavas are my favorite currently.
The second day we were sent out in small groups to explore different parts of the city like the National Museum as part of our Human in the Tropics class. Inside the National Museum, there was a very cool butterfly garden.
About 65% of the population of Costa Rica lives in or around San Jose, so studying urbanization is part of the class. As part of understanding the urbanization in developing countries like Costa Rica, we priced items sold in stores and interviewed people our age at the Central Market and the University of San Jose to find out more about their energy consumption and to be able to calculate their “Ecological Footprint.” Going to the University was one of my favorite parts of the day but it was a frustrating experience finding it. We first had to find a bus that got us close. Once on the bus, we went beyond our actual stop and had to ask many people before we were able to locate where it is. Because the streets aren’t named, directions are usually along the lines of “Go Right for about 200 meters, and go left”. We eventually made it and spent most of the time in the front of the university and there were so many students hanging out. There were bars and restaurants lining the streets that led to the entrance. Coming from Puget Sound, the amount of students and all the activities going on reminded me of Log Jam. Finding certain places was a struggle at times like finding the right bus to go on, but in the end, it will make us be better at Spanish and be more comfortable using it.
Tomorrow we leave on our first field trip on the Pacific side of the country. It will be about two weeks where we will end up in Monteverde at the biological station. While it has been fun in San Jose, I can speak for everyone on my program that we all can’t wait to be in the field and see all of the amazing things here Costa Rica. There definitely will be more pictures and details next time!