Gallivanting

This weekend Nadav (new intern) and I took off for the capital, San Jose. I would like it to be known (coughcoughMom) that we walked throughout the city, couch surfed, and clubbed and came back in one piece, with all of our personal belongings.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with couch surfing, it's a website that connects travelers with locals who are interested in hosting them. Anyone can sign up for it, and people write reviews of their hosts/travelers to maintain a kind of oversight. Hosts aren't supposed to charge, but it's considered good couch surfing manners to help your host out by making dinner or giving them a bottle of wine or something. Treating your host like a hotel is also strongly discouraged- couch surfing is more about cultural exchange than finding a free night's sleep.

In this case we stayed with a 24 year old computer programmer that Nadav had stayed with last weekend. We met at the bus stop, took the bus to his apartment, cooked dinner together, and went out with our host and his friends to Vertigo, a night club in San Jose. He was super welcoming and even though we were a little last minute he fit us in with his friends and their plans. We talked a fair amount in the evening and he cheerfully corrected our Spanish. After the club we slept on his futon, then took the bus into downtown in the morning.

The rest of the day Nadav and I kind of wandered around San Jose and went to the Museo Nacional, which had a lot of Pre-Colombian artifacts. It was also in an old fortress, which was pretty cool. It was pretty chill, just eating when we wanted to eat and stopping where we wanted to stop. Even though we didn't have specific plans it was nice to get out of the center for a while and see the rest of Costa Rica. I think we're going to try to do something like that most weekends, the only problem is limited time. We have to work Saturdays for at least part of the day, and then occasionally we have to be on call for Sundays. But between all three interns and the SAM, I think at least some of us should be able to travel around most weekends. It got really boring hanging around Atenas every weekend during the summer session.

Tomorrow's a pretty big day for the center. Rainforest Alliance comes in the morning to assess the campus for certification. If we get the certification, I think we'll be the only Rainforest Alliance certified study abroad center, and we'll be living up to our "Center for Sustainable Development Studies" name. Later in the day, the students get here! I'm sure we'll be running around all day trying to accommodate everyone.

I'm curious what the semester students will be like. We got a little bit of a profile on them from their applications, so I know there's a lot of really active people in the group. It'll be nice to have them for a longer period of time, I feel like with the summer session I didn't get to know a lot of the students that well, especially if they weren't in Carlos's DR group.

I also realized today that I thought my ~3 months in Mexico lasted forever, but I've already been in Costa Rica 2 months and sometimes I feel like I just got here! Other times it feels like home, particularly when I'm coming back from a trip.