And we're back

Hello from Monteverde, Costa Rica! Here I kick off the next, and
perhaps grandest, of my adventures. I am in Costa Rica for the next
three weeks awakening (and hopefully building on!) my high school
Spanish, so that I'm a little bit more prepared to spend this coming
November through May-ish in South America. My friend Lucy and I are
going down to Argentina in November to work on a farm (WWOOFing) for a
few weeks and then we're just going to see what opportunities we run
into.

We flew into San Jose yesterday morning and then met our transfer bus
at a nearby Denny's (authentic, I know) to head up into the cloud
forest of Monteverde. The drive was gorgeous, as expected, and the
roads were much better than expected. In the late afternoon I arrived
at my home stay- a mother and father with a few children around my age
who all still live at home. The custom here is to live with your
parents until you get married. None of them speak English and my
Spanish is pretty rusty, so our broken conversation was awkward at
best, but I'm optimistic about the coming evenings. Unfortunately, I'm
in one of the few homestays with no wifi, but I guess the silver
lining is getting a taste of being totally removed from communication.
Even in Uganda I usually had email on my phone. There aren't computers
at the school (well there are but they're too slow to handle any
website) but luckily I set up email blogging when I was in Uganda-
hence the continued use of this blog.

Today I started Spanish classes at 7am. When I woke up in the morning,
most of the family was already gone for the day! The Spanish school is
really beautiful. Its located on a fairly large compound and has
landscaping with flowers everywhere. A huge benefit of being stuck in
a cloud for the majority of the day is that everything around here is
unbelievably green and lush.

Spanish class was pretty rough at first but my learning curve is
pretty steep so I'm already more comfortable speaking than I was 24
hours ago. In the morning I have 4 hours of class with a teacher and
one other person. Then after lunch I have an hour and a half of one on
one conversation. My biggest accomplishment here so far is surviving
that first block of one on one conversation. I didn't know I
remembered enough vocabulary to hold a conversation even half that
long! Whew.

Usually in the afternoons we'll do some activity- they offer zip
lining, coffee and sugar cane tours, hiking, etc. Today though, I'm
thoroughly exhausted. Turns out all the adjustments take a lot of
energy out of you.

Alright. Thats all for today, but the school has wifi so I am hoping
to update fairly regularly. Ciao for now!