It´s been about three days since I arrived here in Costa Rica, and it´s been pretty hectic. Getting here was quite the adventure. My flight to Miami was cancelled, my rescheduled flight to Washington DC sat on the runway for an hour, and my flight from Washington to Miami landed and proceeded to sit at the gate as my Costa Rican flight´s departure time came and went. Oh, and they lost my bags. After running through the terminal to catch my slightly delayed flight (kinda like that scene in Home Alone, only without the overly-dramatic music to bring a sense of levity to the situation), I caught the flight with about two minutes to spare. The group spent the first night in a hostel, then set out the next morning to go to the immigration office to fill out the first in a supposedly endless series of forms. Getting fingerprinted was fun, and considering that the office was surrounded by policemen, I was waiting for someone to be whisked out the back door, never to be seen again.
After some lunch, we headed to a hospital to meet out doctors. He gave his talk in a monotone voice, making sure to slip in marginally funny sarcastic comments... needless to say I´m a big fan. During the talk, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck San Jose, shaking the building and causing me to yell out that someone save the leftover sandwiches. Apparently, ticos either don´t understand much English, don´t appreciate jokes during natural disasters, or both. Everyone ended up being OK... the earthquake hit harder outside of San Jose, and unfortunately four people died in mudslides.
After that excitement, we headed onto the bus to move to Orosi, a small town in a valley about an hour and a half from San Jose. After a quick meeting talking about how we´ll definitely be embarrasing ourselves with our language gaffes, we met our host families. My family is quite small by Costa Rican standardsÑ a mother and two songs, ages 18 and 20. They´re quite accomodating, especially when it comes to the fact that I only understand about 30% of what they say, and only respond in choppy sentences solely in the present tense. We ate some dinner (rice, beans, and chicken), and the son and I sat down and went through his bootleg DVD collection. After watching some reggaeton music videos set to cut-up clips from Shrek, SNL, and the like, the whole family sat down to watch news coverage of the earthquake. Despite the morbidity of the situation, it was actually a good way of bonding, as I peppered them with questions about how to say words like ¨landslide¨ in Spanish. Good, clean, family fun.
Today, we hosted some family games on the town´s plaza. I paired up with a kid named Jonathan, who was about ten, and we proceeded to completely dominate the day. Eventually, we dubbed ourselves Equipo Ganamos, and taunted the other teams with the multiple boligrafos that we had won with each contest. (So in case you were wondering... yes, despite the change in country, I´m still a huge jerk.) Some other volunteers and I headed out to lunch after, and I got a giant plate rice, beans, chicken, and other various veggies for all of $4. If the same resaurant was in Braintree, there´s a good chance that I´d be there 3-4 times a day.
Well, we´re done for the day, so I´m off to swim and eventually study some Spanish. I´ll try to upload some pictures soon. As always, e-mails and comments are much appreciated. Talk to everyone soon!
Dan
