Estoy en Costa Rica finalmente!

Hola!

What a whirlwind it has been. Where to start. I was able to find the EWH group at the airport quite easily due to the fact that we were all wearing bright pink shirts. I got to know a lot of them and I found out that 3 other Michigan students were actually going on this trip. We managed to get to San Jose by 9, however, it was completely dark (a little unnerving for the first time to a foreign country). However, we manged to find the director at the airport who shuttled us into a bus to head to our school where we would drop off the medical equipment that we had brought up and to meet our homestay family.

The ride to our homestay was different, especially in the dark. There was a lot of turning down small streets, houses are everywhere, but luckily it was not raining. We managed to converse with both our house mom and her son (Angela and Alex) even though they both speak only spanish. We found our way to our rooms, took showers, and went to bed since we had to get up in the morning. Unfortunately, I have not uploaded picture yet but I will soon so everyone can see the house. It's quite nice, we have our own beds, running water, food, and even wireless internet (internet is hard to come by at the house so to have wireless is absolutely amazing).

The past two days has shown me what to expect from the training; 4 hours of spanish in the morning, hour break, 4 hours of medical intrumentation training and lab. I was able to be placed in the advanced spanish course, only spanish is spoken and so far we have reviewed in incredibly detail half of the verb tenses. Now I feel a bit overwhelmed with all the knowledge I have to know, but I think I can manage. This is definately not a vacation. In order to get to our school, we must take a bus, but it is very difficult to figure out where they stop or where we are since I can see no sign for stops and most streets don't have names (really, no number or anything, they go based on location to landmarks, try navigating through that).

So far, the weather isn't as hot as I thought. It's been about 70 in the morning and getting to about 85 during the day, still humid of course. However, they are in the rainy season so at around 1 o clock in the afternoon, it downpours. Since the place is mountainous, the roads seem to become raging rapids, which is why they have deep trenches next to the streets (around 2 feet deep or more). And, I have not seen any large bugs or anything to that nature yet, but I'm waiting to find a tarantula in the shower.

Tomorrow, we are going white water rafting! I here this is one of the best locations in the world to do it so this should be really exciting. Please post comments or any questions you may have! I promise to upload pictures soon.

Hasta luego!