First Day of Classes

Today was the first day of classes. I am a half hour by bus from my program site which meant that I had to wake up at 6:00 this morning. The bus left at 6:45. This was quite the experience, the bus was so full that I was in charge of holding the doors closed so that no one fell out. After a couple stops it calmed down and I was able to sit down. I'm very glad that my host mom was there because the bus system here is very tricky, everything is marked by colors and if you look very closely by what town you want to get to there are also no assigned stops only buttons that you press when you want the bus to stop. Due to this fact the bus stops every hundred or so yards and moves at a ridiculously slow pace. After the bus we made our way to the ACM building.
               I said goodbye to my host mom and awkwardly sat with everyone. For a precious few minutes we were allowed to speak english but class began rather quickly, the first thing we did was sign a contract promising only to speak spanish on ACM premises, with each other, and with our families. Everyone in the program seems really nice, there are fifteen of us altogether. Because my program is through the associated colleges of the midwest (ACM) all of us come from small liberal arts colleges like Grinnell so we have things to talk about which is nice. Around 11 we took both an oral and a written exam to determine our spanish level which was really no fun at all but, after we were done with the written portion we got to drink coffee which I'm sure I will be addicted to by the end of the week. Lunch immediately followed coffee time which didn't make much sense to me but thats ok. We went down to the university of costa rica campus for lunch which was rice and beans because I could not afford anything else. The lunch vendors only accept colones and the 10,000 bills I brought which are like $20 are outdated and no longer accepted in Costa Rica so I only had about $4 for lunch and I needed to save 1 for the bus back. The good news in this is that I can have a decently filling lunch for only $3 but the bad news is that all my costa rican money is useless. My program director and I are going to the central bank tomorrow to see if I can exchange it.
                The rest of the day was spent getting to know each other and learning about social norms. It was very nice but I am super exhausted. By 4 I was ready for the day to end however my host mom and I needed to buy a cell phone for me which took an hour. But now I'm back at my house trying to figure out how to use it. I'm trying my best not to cheat and switch the settings to English.
               I'm noticing that I've been describing everything as nice, this is because my spanish vocabulary is currently limited and my best descriptor for everything is que linda which translates to how nice therefore when I think back on my day the adjective for describing everything is nice.