So heres the blog game-plan, I will write every week or so, as long as I have something interesting to write about, other wise blog posts would get boring fast.
Let's begin with an update of what I have been up to.
Of course, there has been school everyday, and since Independence Day was today, we have been having a lot of assemblies and traditional Costa Rican things this past week. School is hard, I have been here for over a month now so people are expecting me to know what is going on all the time, but everything is very disorganized so it is still very hard. Making friends is harder than it sounds, especially when you don't speak the language, but I am hoping that will get easier with time.
Today was independence day here in this fine country, and I walked in the parade with some other students from my school, and it was a really good experience. I really felt like I was a part of a community. Being an exchange student can be very, very lonely, and it was finally nice to feel like I belonged somewhere.
I am so grateful to my host family, especially my host mother. I am so impressed with how patient they are with my spanish, and how much they respect how hard being an exchange student is. My host siblings have discovered Netflix on my iPad and so now one of them is usually sitting on my bed, watching something that I don't understand and laughing hysterically at it.
Last weekend my family went to a family friend's ranch which was absolutely gorgeous. We walked down a very very steep hill to get to a river which I, of course, sat in fully-clothed. There was also a beautiful pool which we swam in, and we finished the afternoon with fried fish filets and gallo pinto. I have also been spending at lot of time going to dinners and parties at my family's friend's houses, and going out with my friends. One does have to realize that this is a normal family with normal responsibilities and lives and so there are going to be slow, Netflix kind of days, and thats ok.
I learned today that I have to take the next exams in October, and that my host family has running bets on how low my scores will be.
I have been having a lot of orientations and chapter meetings, and in a couple weeks I have the big one in San Jose with all the students in Costa Rica. I am glad that AFS is concerned about how we are coming along, and wants us to be comfortable, but I have to admit that I have had enough orientating. I am ready to just be here and not be constantly reminded that this is only one year which will end all too soon.
On the spanish front, it is improving, I understand a lot more than I did when I arrived, but it is the responding part that is hard. I am trying, but it is much easier for me to the translate the spanish that I hear into english in my mind, than it is to translate the english that I hear into the spanish that I must speak. I go to spanish classes every saturday morning and that is helping to teach me the more complicated things, like conjugation and the tenses. I often find myself getting frustrated because normally I can pretty well articulate how I feel, but here I feel as if I am floundering around, clinging to the little spanish I can speak. But in some ways, thats the beauty of this experience. You learn a lot about what you are capable of when you are in a situation like this. I think that you have to let it beat you down and drive you insane before you can truly realize how completely and totally possible and attainable it all is.
In regards to homesickness, after cutting off from my parents at home, things have gotten about 800% easier. But I still miss things now and then. I would say the thing I miss the most is being able to drive, and little things that I never even knew were important until they were gone. The weirdest things trigger it, like a smell blowing on the breeze that reminds me of apple cider in autumn, or the sound of a shoe scuffing on the ground reminds me of the tennis seasons that went by to quickly. Someone unzipping their backpack reminds me of waking up in the tent on chilly mornings in the mountains.
It has always irritated me how people make traveling out to be nothing but spectacular and beautiful and full of awe and discovery. Certainly, a year abroad does have plenty of moments like this, but as I have experienced in only a month and a week in Costa Rica, life abroad is just as hard as life in your home country, for many of the same reasons, but also for many different reasons. People think that when you travel you leave all your troubles behind, completely fresh and free of the worries and complications of normal life. But what you find, in fact, is that the problems stay with you, you just leave your support system and your comfort zone behind. What you discover after awhile is the reason you feel so free and liberated is because you've learned to solve your problems on your own, not because you've forgotten all of them.
Next weekend my family is going to the beach, and I have always found the ocean very therapeutic so I am very much looking forward to that trip.
Until next time, dear readers. Photos to follow.
Emma, the wanderlust-ful