It's been a while since you fine folk have heard from me. I didn't die, or fall off the face of the Earth. My old blog did, though. Glimpse has changed their website, and no longer hosts blogs. However, my old posts are still available for your perusing pleasure!
http://archive.glimpse.org/people/blog/user/21125/
I'm a month into the "new" semester. I have a new roommate, Claire. And I just finished up Advanced Spanish 1. (I never thought a day would come where I could say that.)
I must say, the second semester has been a mixed bag.
When I arrived here on September 25, 2010, and I looked out of the plane onto the green mountains of Costa Rica, I was amazed and humbled to have arrived. I was here! I was in the tropics! Adventure and beaches and friendly people awaited me! It was my honey moon period, and it lasted all of five minutes, when I had to wait in a 30 minute line to get through customs, to wait another hour to take a cushy bus to my new city-- San Jose. When I actually saw San Jose, my outlook on life didn't improve. I was tired, sweaty, had just had a lot of trouble getting here... and the city was covered in graffiti and barbed wire. But the situation was salvageable! I mean, I still had to meet my host family. Surely they would be the epitome of AWESOME.
Then I met Rosa, and realized she didn't speak English. And I? I didn't speak Spanish. It was enough to put a girl in tears, really. Fortunately, my first semester I had a fantastic roommate (Kris) who DID speak Spanish-- and pretty well, too. But in any case, I pretty much hated San Jose for the first month. We had excursions on the weekend, and I wasn't too big a fan of those, either. The hotels were amazing, and I felt like a fraud. F-R-A-U-D. But I made some good friends on the excursions, and we had a pretty tight little group for the rest of the semester.
So. This semester? Is way different. I was sitting in my class of Espanol Avanzado 1, and I realized that I could understand EVERYTHING the teacher was saying. That was such a stark contract to sitting in Basic 2 three months earlier, near to tears because I didn't speak Spanish and I couldn't understand the professor at all. Every day in September I felt like I HAD to buy a plane ticket so I could go home early. By the end of my first day in Advanced 1, I was pretty ecstatic.
Aside from being able to hold a conversation in a Spanish class, I'm also able to walk around the city without a big cloud of paranoia floating above my head. I feel far more confident navigating the city now. The barbed wire doesn't even scare me any more, and some of the graffiti is just awesome. I'll get ya some pictures sometime.
On the downside, those excursions that helped me cement my friendships last semester aren't really an option this time around, so I'm finding it harder to make friends with this group. But it's all good in the hood. I've got eight more weeks to go. And I haven't even thought about buying a plane ticket home early this semester.
Bring it. :)
