Settling in....

Wow, it feels like I have been here for weeks. Last weekend, I met my host family and they are wonderful. My mom, Eugenia, is a complete jokester. She is a homemaker and I swear she is like a housewife from the 50s. All that she does is cook and clean ALL day. It is bizzare. She is awesome and loves to tell me dirty jokes. My dad, Carlos, is great as well. I guess he is the boss of a major electrical company here. No wonder my mom doesn´t work. My oldest brother, Carlos, is pretty shy. He is a great artist and has shared some of his paintings with me. He also knows some English (so does the dad) which is nice. Here, they only have 4 hours of English a week. Needless to say, they don´t know much, even though he is in highschool. He loves Raven, from the Disney channel. It is interesting because they are really racist here! They make fun of chinese and black people all of the time!! It´s crazy. They also have ¨Nica" jokes. They are our version of blonde jokes, but for Nicaraguans. A ton of Nicaraguans immigrate to Costa Rica and most Costa Ricans have little respect for them and call them "tontos" which means dumb. Next, my brother Ricardo is 11. He is full of energy and I play ping-pong with him for hours at a time. He also took me on a hike to the top of our farm (which goes on for like a mile). It felt like we were on top of a mountain. I could see the next city over, Puntarenas, as well as the coast! Beautiful! On the way back down, however, a bull from the farm started chasing us and I felt like I was running for my life! We finally made it back to the house safely. We have 2 parrots, 1 that speaks spanish. My host mom said it can live to be 50 years old! CRAZY! Sadly, my dog, YACKIE, is only a watch dog and I can´t play with it. Animals are walking around here but the people just like have them for no reason because they don´t play with them!!! There are so many cute little puppies here though!! My little sister, Carolina, is quite a handful. She is a sweetheart, and is 7. She definitely defines the lack of privacy aspect of the Tiko culture. I am staying in her room with her things, but she is sleeping in the guest room. Not sure why? But yea, so she will just randomly walk into my room when the door is closed. She also wants to be with me every second of every day. I am used to having much more time to myself! Everything besides the lack of privacy...is great with my family! I am learning so much Spanish with them and they are so patient and helpful with me. I feel like a part of the family and it hasn´t even been a week. Unfortunately, Justine (a girl from the program) and I live like 5 miles away from the school and everyone else. We are supposed to take the bus and they said they would pay us back but sadly the bus situation is not working out. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn´t. There are different types of buses some go to different towns and others are really expensive. We have been having a hard time with figuring that out and yesterday the program director came with us to talk to the bus people and they said that there is no set schedule. SO, we may possibly have to switch families to be closer to everyone else OR we will have to figure out another form of transportation. It is up in the air right now and it causing Justine and I some anxiety and so that will be interesting to see what happens there.
School is great as well, my Costa Rican health care class is great. It is really interesting and it sounds like we will be going on some great fieldtrips to clinics and other medical facilities (so long as swine flu isnt an issue there). A lot of things are being put on hold because of the swine flu so hopefully by the end of the program more things will be certain and we wil be able to go. My spanish class is awesome as well. I have a HILARIOUS professor named Raul. He is from Nicaragua and everything he does and says makes me laugh. I don´t mind going to class everyday because the time flies by and we have a pool there to swim in and are classes are in a bamboo hut that is open and fresh air is constantly flowing through. It is wonderful!
The food here is amazing. I am eating far too much of it though and I am excited to start exercising next week. We have a soccer field that I am going to run in during our breaks between classes then I can go take a nice dip in the pool! My host mom is trying to get me fat! I guess the mothers that host girls here try to feed us as much as possible so we gain weight so that when we leave and see our real families again, they know that we were being fed enough! Ha! We will see how that goes. For breakfast, often I get Gallo Pinto which is rice, beans, and eggs and some other special seasoning because it tastes like heaven. I am also ADDICTED to coffee. It is amazing here. So good. We have breakfast, lunch, SNACK at 4 which is coffee and bread with different fruit spreads, then dinner. My mom packs a lunch for me everyday and everything is fresh, health and delicious...can´t find that too often! We have mango and lemon trees in our front yard so that makes things easier as well.
The girls in my group are awesome! I think we get along really well and we are having a lot of fun! We have already planned a lot of weekend trips here and I am looking forward to them a lot. Everyone loves it here!

So overall, I don´t know what else I could write about. I need to do a better job of journaling and organizing my thoughts each day so that when I get a chance to use internet, I can remember everything! So, thats it for now! I´ll write again after the weekend. We are planning on going zip-lining and to Puntarenas to go to the beach!

Hasta luego!