Hola from Costa Rica!

Hey, everybody! I hope your summers are all awesome and exciting (and it looks like they are from your blog posts :D).

Right now I´m sitting in the cluster at la Universidad de Costa Rica, waiting for my second Spanish lit class to start. (This computer lab is my only Internet access, like Lindsay said, because my host family woefully doesn´t have Internet :( Although they do have one TV for every room haha.) I´ve been spending the past six weeks soaking in Spanish from my university classes, my host family, and interactions with random ticos (Costa Ricans). I´ve been to a couple tourist spots like the Poas Volcano and the Peace Waterfalls, and I´ve been secretly urbanizing myself by hanging out a lot in downtown San Jose, which is like a cross between a super-dense city and a quaint town with fruit stands and street vendors everywhere. It´s pretty distinctive and probably my favorite place so far, outside of the week I spent in Nicaragua. :D Both Nicaragua and Costa Rica are actually more similar to America than I thought (especially due to the importing of tons of American culture through movies, music, and chain stores like Wal-Mart (which here is named ¨Mas X Menos,¨or ¨More for Less¨)). Nevertheless, there´s definitely a really distinctive culture here that underwent globalization and rising industry way differently. There´s a more direct presence of patriarchal systems, objectification of women, and stereotyping based on race here in Costa Rica and in Nicaragua, but it´s been really interesting learning to deal with/confront it in my personal development and my interpersonal interactions. (Also, there´s never toilet paper in the public bathrooms because people steal them... because there usually isn´t TP in the first place. Neverending cycle of TP-lessness!)

All in all, it´s been a really cool, distinctive, and loco summer so far. I´m about to take a trip with my family to the Arenal Volcano this weekend, and finally getting my reading done when they bring me my copy of ¨The Impossible Will Take a Little While¨ from the U.S. haha. Fingers crossed that they find their way from the airport to my school.

Hasta luego! See you all in a month!