Today was our last day of class at LASP and ICADS! I can hardly believe it...time has gone so fast and it was surreal to go through the day knowing that it was the last time I would carry out this routine. Its hard to grasp the fact that today was the end of those two principal parts of my semester because there's still so much time left here. Once I finally started to come to terms with the concept of leaving, I was really sad to say goodbye to both classes. They've been incredibly helpful in helping me understand many aspects of the world around me, from how people communicate to how economic systems are run, and now its time to move on and figure out how to apply all of this new information.
In relation to that, my internship is just around the corner. I will be leaving San Jose on Monday and moving in with a new host family in San Juan de Chicua, a small town located near Volcano Irazu in Cartago (a province of Costa Rica). Apart from the limited information given to me by LASP (that my new host mom loves to cook, where to catch the bus in San Jose on Monday morning, and that I'll be working in a school), I have no idea what to expect. I will be living in San Juan for a little more than 3 weeks, and the only contact I will have with anyone from LASP will come in the form of one short visit from one of my professors at some point during that time. It will be a great time to improve my Spanish, and I'm really looking forward to familiarizing myself with a school here. It will be interesting to see what my new family is like, how well I will be able to communicate, and to adapt to a new way of life all over again.
To close off our classroom portion of class at LASP, we gave our group presentations this morning, and at ICADS we took our final quizzes. The fact that we are almost leaving didn't even hit me until we were on our way back from ICADS. We made a few stops on the way, enjoying the freedom of not having any homework for the weekend, and I spent some time at an e-cafe calling home and researching classes for this summer. I was worried about getting home late (no one answered when I called my host family), so I rushed to catch the bus as soon as it started getting dark.
This proved to be a problem when I realized when I was half-way home that I had forgotten my flash drive at the e-cafe. I quickly got off the bus and waited for one going back the opposite direction in hopes that Costa Rica's standards of hospitality rang true even among e-cafe guests. It took forever for the bus to show up, and by the time I got back to the e-cafe I was not surprised to find out that my flash drive had disappeared. It was worth a try, anyway. By this point it was actually pretty dark out, so I took a taxi back up the hill to my house in order to get there more quickly and to avoid waiting in the cold at the bus stop for the third time in less than an hour.
My taxi driver was super friendly, and I thoroughly enjoyed having the ability to carry a relatively fluid conversation with him in Spanish. When I got home, I explained what happened to my host family, and mami made me some “Chinese rice” for dinner. Melany and I colored for a while, and then Kevin joined us for a few games of Dominoes. Before long, I was yawning so frequently that Kevin encouraged me to go to bed rather than fall asleep playing the game. While the allergy medicines I've been taking seem to be helping my eyes a lot, I've still been having some other allergy symptoms, and a good night's rest without anything to worry about for tomorrow sounds wonderful.
I'm not sure what the internet situation at my next house will be or when I'll be able to post again. It sounds like I should be able to get online at least once or twice to check in, but I could also potentially have internet at my new house or in the school where I will be working. Who knows... Unreliable internet coupled with no longer having a flash drive could potentially complicate the whole posting process. I'll be in San Juan until April 12, so if nothing else I'll do my best to get some posts up in the days following my return to San Jose.
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