Costa Rica!

(a butterfly up close and personal)

(on my way to ziplining!)

(my Costa Rican 'sisters')

I have some time now to write about Costa Rica and in a nutshell:

IT WAS AWESOME!!!

I come up with some pretty awesome ideas and this is perhaps one of the awesome-est. I was there for about a month and lived with a Costa Rican family in two cities--Santo Domingo de Heredia (small suburb of San Jose) and Manuel Antonio (wild beach town).

(my first class, teacher and classmates)

In Santo Domingo, the first city in which I lived, the weather was PERFECT everyday, about 80-88F every single day. The school was beautiful and the teachers were excellent. The classes were very small, about 2-3 people in each class (because of the holidays the classes were very small).

I learned SO much spanish and saw so many animals up close! I spoke spanish with my family nearly every night and that helped to improve my spanish quite a bit.

I would go to school every day between 8-1 or 8-4 then I would either hang out with my classmates or go home. We all went home before dark, which was normally around 6pm. Because of the proximity to the equator Costa Rica is on 12-hour days. So the sun would rise around 5.30 or 6am or so and set around 6pm.

On the weekends I would travel around Costa Rica to see the sights and participate in activities-- volcanoes, hot springs, national parks, ziplining, tours and so on.