New Home!

I am officially living the Tica life!  All of us students moved off campus on Saturday and now each of us are placed with a different host family.  Mine lives in a beautiful house five minute's walk from central San Rafael.  Every single wall is painted a different color and there are three fuzzy little tootsie-roll dogs that you have to be careful not to sit on.  There are three people officially in my family: Gabriela, the Mom who is a school teacher; Dilana, who is 18 and a student at the university; and Kris, who is 13 and does magic tricks.  It's a bit complicated though because Jovani, Gabriela's boyfriend, and Steven, his son, are here a lot.  Also Gabriela's sister and her husband are living in the back room with their three dogs while their house is under construction for the next two weeks.  Lots of people, lots of fun.  Hay que hablar el Español todo el día.

Here's the living room.  The TV is always on, which bugs me a lot but whatever.

This is my room.  The bathroom is next to it and is huge, so it's possible that the builders made a mistake and put the plumbing for the bathroom where the bedroom was supposed to be, and then just went with it.

The kitchen.  The food is awesome, lots of rice and beans.  I'm going to be so fat.  Take note: if you finish the food on your plate, it means you want more.  So if you are full, you need to leave a few bites of each thing or you will have yet another spoonful of beans pressed upon you.

 Say hi to one of the tootsie rolls!  You can't see them, but she has bows on her ears like a build-a-bear.

And there's an upstairs too but I haven't been up there yet.  From what I understand, it's sectioned off with curtains to create more bedrooms because Gabriela's sister is in her bedroom so she's living in the loft.

I was supposed to start my internship at a local elementary school today, but there was some miscommunication so I showed up in the Director's office and he hadn't even talked to the teacher that I'm supposed to work with (or figured out who that will be).  I sat in his office waiting for so long that I was sure he was looking for security to take away the weird gringa that no one told him was coming.  Fortunately, I had my ninja stars in my pocket so I escaped quite easily.  So that's a no-go.  Hopefully I'll be able to start next Monday and he will actually know who I am and where I am supposed to work.

So instead of working at the school, I went to the bank to change some American dollars into Colones and the bank teller looked at me like he had never seen an American passport before.  Dude, you changed my bus money yesterday - this is not a new experience for you.

And now I'm in my room delaying doing homework because pura vida.