I’ve almost made it through my first week! It’s been a bit overwhelming – my brain is a fried from the effort of translating everything in my head into Spanish, so this is likely to be utterly incomprehensible. Bear with me! Every morning at 7:30, I walk to the ICADS building in San Pedro (part of San Jose) with another girl in the program named Alex in time to get to Spanish class by 8. I tested into a class with three other students and a marvelous teacher named Gabi who makes all of our lessons into games, but our teacher changes every week so I won’t have her for long. At noon, all of the students (there are 17 of us from different schools around the US) are then released into San Jose for an hour to go get some lunch. Every day, my host mom packs me a sack full of fresh mangoes, pineapple, strawberry and banana (the fruit here is completely amazing and we eat it for every single meal!), so I usually just go to the grocery store and get a sandwich. After lunch, we have a class called Latin American Perspectives on Justice and Sustainable Development from 1-5, but the first few afternoons we went over a lot of orientation information, so I’ve only had two days of the class. Every day we have a guest lecturer, and so far it’s been really interesting. On Tuesday afternoon, all of us were shipped off to downtown San Jose on a bus sans directors with a scavenger hunt type activity in an attempt to force us to get a feeling for the city and the bus system. We were in groups of three, and my group was fairly miserable at city navigation and mostly wandered about aimlessly, but we had a good time. We went to the post office to buy stamps, one of the POPS restaurants that are absolutely everywhere to get ice cream and a fish market to look at the sharks. The sharks had no heads, and therefore no teeth – rather a disappointment. But still, sharks! Oh, on a random note, the program directors told us that the beaches here are unlikely to have many sharks but that the crocodile population has been booming. Also, riptides have drowned something like half of all of the people who have gone swimming this rainy season. Happy swimming! Anyway, Tuesday was the birthday of a girl in the program, so that night most of us went to a bar near my house called Ciros and drank Costa Rican beers that all seemed to be called “Imperial” and tried hard to fit in, but the bartenders kept laughing at our attempts at Spanish and playing the Spice Girls. I fear that I shall never be mistaken for a native. Ah well. It was very fun, but we all stayed out until 1:30 and then had to get up at 6:30 for class. Blech. The rest of the week has been fairly uneventful as days in Costa Rica go, which is to say quite eventful, but I am very tired and don’t want to write much more. On weekends, the ICADS program doesn’t have anything planned in the way of group tours, so we are encouraged to make our own travel plans if we want to explore. This weekend, I’m planning on taking a bus to a rainforest next to the Pacific Ocean called Parque Nacional Carara (I think) on Saturday morning with four other friends and staying until Sunday afternoon to do some hiking and sightseeing. Buses here are very cheap – taking the bus all the way to the coast only costs something like three dollars! One of the program directors recommended to the park to us and told us that we could stay in nearby Tárcoles in a run down old house that was likely to have moldy pillows but be very cheap – perfect! Anyway, this has gotten quite long and, as promised, entirely incomprehensible, so I better sign off. Hope that everyone is doing well!