Update

Our little store on the left and our church strait ahead.

My room....decorated with punk rock postes and stickers. (My host brother loves old-school american/british punk rock.

My house is back in the trees you cant really see it in the picture

I would post more pictures but it takes forever.

Sorry I haven’t written in a while, it has been pretty hard for me to get to an internet café. There is no organization to this post, I have just jotted down a few random thoughts and experiences.

Basically, I have been living with my host family for a week now and everything is going pretty well, accept for the fact that I can only understand 35% of what they are saying to me. I live with an older couple and their 32 year old son and 29 year old daughter. They are all very patient and try to help me a lot. I wish I could talk to them more but I’m sure that will come in time. We live in a very small town way up in the mountains about an hour for San Jose by bus. It’s a very beautiful area and is actually pretty chilly, especially at night. The food is different but really good, it´s not all rice and beans everyday yet. The house its actually really nice and even has a hot shower.
Our town has a small pulperia (food store) an elementary school, a church, bar, community center, and soccer field. There are 3 other trainees in my town, two are in the “advanced” Spanish class while myself and the other are in the “beginner.” The two of us have our beginner classes about 2-3 days a week from 8:30am until 4:00ish with an hour break for lunch. The classes are right in the community center, which is only a few minutes walk from our house. The other days of the week we get together with either the 14 other Rural Community Development (RCD) trainees or all 54 traineers from Tico 18 (our training class) for technical, safety, health, and cross-cultural training. Its great to see everyone again. We all became pretty close during the first week and now we only see each other once in a while.
By the way there is a gang of renegade cows that roam the streets of my town at night causing trouble. The other night they got through the gate of our house (I think I left it open by accident) and started eating all my host mom’s flowers. We had to go outside and heard them back out onto the street.
Friday night most of the RCD trainees and I (about 12 of us) went to a pizzeria close to my town for dinner. It is right on the side of the mountain (like most of the house in the area) and has the most amazing view of San Jose at night. Everyone had a couple slices of pizza and a couple beers and it was only about $6 each. It seems like most things are a little bit cheaper here (not much) but during training we only make about $4 a day so we still have to be careful.
Yesterday afternoon myself and 2 of the girls from my town took the bus into San Jose with one of the girls host brothers. He showed us around downtown and took us to this really cool music/dance festive. There was all kinds of entertainment: Celtic music, break dancing, Samurai fighting, belling dancing, Caribbean music, and venders selling every you could think of….and this was only during the couple hours we were there, I guess the festival went on for the whole weekend.
At about 6:50pm we were on our way to the bus stop to get the last bus to our town, which came at 7:00pm, when we stopped on the street to meet a friend of the host brother. This was a disabled man in a wheel chair who was blind and didn’t have complete use of either of his hands. He was at least in his 70 and was sitting in the street in his wheelchair with an accordion and a trumpet. He was very friendly and seemed extremely happy. After helping him for about 5 minutes to get his accordion on and get everything situated we gave him 300 colones (about 60 cents) and he played us a song dedicated to “Sarita” (Sarah, on of the girls). It was one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. When he finally finished the song we hurried to the bus stop just in time to see the taillights of the last bus driving away. The host brother hailed a taxi and we had to race the bus to the next stop about 10 minutes away. We took a shortcut and made it with literally 5 seconds to spare. It would have been a very expensive taxi ride all the way back to our town. There is a lot of other cool stuff that has happened but i dont really have time to wrete eveything down.

Some observations so far:

-All the houses I have seen, even in the smaller towns, have big metal fences (many with razor wire) and bared windows. People are very friendly but don’t seem very trusting here.
-A lot of women like to wear tights jeans and very revealing tops (not that Im complaining)
-I have never seen so many motorcycles´/ dirtbikes in my life.
-It seems like everyone ownes at least 3 dogs and there are even more strays wandering the streets.
-There is barely enough room for a single bus on some of the mountain roads yet motorcycles still pass the busses on blind turns going uphill.

-People will always help you if you ask, even if that means giving you the wrong information.

Thats it for now. I will post more soon.