Hola todos!  I’M HERE!  Although I did have some trouble at immigration in the airport because I didn’t know the address I was staying at…you’re supposed to be able to stay here 90 days without a visa, and when I told her I didn’t know where I was going, she reduced it to 45 days!  Since I’m staying here longer than that, I was able to convince her that I was, in fact, going home and showed her my return flight information and she changed it back to 90. Yeesh.

I found my ride at the airport pretty easily, and there was a large group of us there – probably about 8 total.  On the ride from the airport we drove through downtown San Jose and there’s lots of American places to eat—I saw Taco Bell, McDonalds, KFC, and lots of Subways.  We are staying outside of San Jose though so we’re in a smaller town.  We all piled into a big van and got dropped off at our respective homes.  One girl I was with lives right next door to me!  She’s on a different volunteer project than me but it’s still nice to know someone.  Also, the drivers here are insane.  The rules of the road seem to be: make up your own rules.  A lot of the roads are just criss-crossing all over the place, with no lines or anything…safe to say you shouldn’t cross the street if you value your life haha.

The house I’m staying in is on a big hill…yes, I can see the mountains from here!  The house is simple but perfectly fine.  It’s more like a boarding house because there’s lots of people staying here, and various members of the family are always walking in and out.  My host mom’s name is Marina Sanchez and her son is Gerson (he’s grown) and they are the ones who are here most of the time.  The first floor of the house is where the family stays, and the kitchen has a big long table.  The food is good though…pretty traditional so far, we had rice with chicken and beans for dinner last night and this morning for breakfast we had eggs, rice, something like a plantain, juice, bread, that kind of stuff.  Since we’re gone during the day our host mom makes us lunch to take with us. 

The second floor of the house is where most of the visitors stay…there’s 3 bedrooms and a bathroom and living space and stuff.  Right now they’re all full, so upstairs there’s 7 people total.  My room is smaller than the size of mom’s closet (not an exaggeration, it’s tiny) with a bunk bed, some shelves, and some drawers so I left my giant suitcase out in the living area or else it would take up the whole room.  Right now my roomie is a girl from Canada and she’s cool and will be here for 2 more weeks.  So far I haven’t met anyone who’s staying longer than me.  Everyone’s staying for different amounts of time, so my roommates will change as time goes on.  There are people from Boston, New Jersey, England, and Canada so there’s lots of accents in that home!  The bathroom is normal, normal shower, and the whole don’t-throw-toilet-paper-in-the-toilet thing isn’t as weird as I thought it would be.

My host mom doesn’t speak much English but her son does.  He’s an angel!  But seriously he’s super nice and chill and helped us a lot when we got there to help us feel comfortable talking and everything.  And it’s really handy because he’s there if we ever don’t understand something.  I can understand pretty much everything they say, because they’re nice and talk slowly haha.  And they can understand me even when I’m not making sense…they’re good at figuring out what we’re trying to say!  I think of the people staying there I have the most Spanish so I can help them out too.  My neighbor that I mentioned before doesn’t know Spanish and her host mom knows no English so when she first got there and she was the only one home with her, there was a bit of a language barrier!  But we visited each other’s houses and I helped her talk to her host mom a little bit. 

There is no internet at home so I can only write when I bring my computer to the office.  It’s about a 15 minute bus ride from home.  I’m waiting for my orientation now so I don’t have any information on my placement yet.  I’m hoping it’s not terribly hard to figure out where I’m going because it sounds like we have to take a lot of buses to get there and they only show us one time before we’re on our own!  My sense of direction tells me…I will get lost.  I don’t know my address because…the addresses are weird and I don’t know how to write it.  The house number here is 22346327 (but I’m not sure if that costs money…sooo just stick to other methods of communication for now…like my phone). 

Well that’s all I can think of for now…more to come later!  I'll try to post pictures once I have some.  Hasta luego!