Day 1

Since I have limited access to the internet until I start school on Monday, the date of these journals will not match with the date posted so I´ll post the date the journal is referring to at the top of the entry.

January 14, 2008 - Day 1 in Costa Rica

First off I´d like to apologize to Joe, I know I kinda copied your joeinargentina journal name with naming my journal Dan in Costa Rica, not very original, huh?. By the way I hope Mexico is excellent and Zach I know how much you love American football and have a hard time accepetingthe concept that there is another type of football, so I hope you´ll get to watch the Super Bowl in Italy.

This first entry is a bit lengthy and probably more boring than future entries since I´m just coming in and getting settled. I apologize for that, I tend to ramble. Future entries probably won´t be this lengthy.


The flight to San Jose only took about 4 hours and I passed the time doing a crossword puzzle and reading a very interesting National Geographic article on North Dakota and Obama´s book.
As we began our descent into San Jose I wasn´t feeling nervous for some reason. Immigration, the baggage claim and customs was a walk in the park and soon enough I was outside in the warm Costa Rican air. The person picking us up was a little late because of traffic so I practiced my pathetic Spanish turning down taxi drivers wanting to know my destination.
Our group assembled one by one outside the airport and we piled into a van to take us through San Jose to the university on the outskirts, in San Pedro. There were six of us in this particular group, two of us from Elon, one from Indiana University, two from George Washington, and one from Suffolk. We talked along the way finding out what we had in common discussing music and what to expect during these four months. We gave the Suffolk kid hell for being a Patriots fan. We talked about getting together and doing things like hiking and bungee jumping, but we honestly don´t know how much we´ll see of one another since there are two different programs and we´re living with host families.

A little bit about what I witnessed along the drive through San Jose. All Latin American nations suffer from primacy, (the exception being Brazil which suffers from dual primacy) where there is one large city that stands as the economic, political, education hub of the nation while the rest of the nation is undeveloped as a result of being cut off from these institutions. In Costa Rica primacy is not as bad because of tourist spots along the coast but it still exists and its effects were visible as we drove through San Jose, its capital and largest city with a greater metro population of 1.5 million. It wasn´t quite like driving through Port-au-Prince since there are stop lights and lots of advertising especially for familiar businesses like McDonald´s and KFC. The air smelled of cheap leaded fuel and traffic was a free for all. The impact of primacy was visible from the road, thousands of residences packed together along narrow streets with gates and surrounding walls topped with broken glass which works as a sort of home security system. The small houses expand up into the hills as San Jose is located in the Central Valley, surrounded by tall mountains. The resulting thermal inversion producing air pollution was clearly visible during the ride as I watched I massive cloud of smog hover along the hillside. As terrible an environment as this sounds this is exactly what I wanted to witness on my trip. Though I want to visit some tourist destinations and am especially excited to see the nations natural beauty I want most to experience the troubled developing sections of the country which aren´t as pretty and designed for tourists who want to experience the beauty of the country while ignoring the nation´s problems. Part of my program is focused on human development and it´s what I´m most interested in and it is my ultimate goal to do work in a developing nation.

The anxiety which had disappeared on the flight came back strong once we reached the university. During the ride I learned that my host family had never done this before so I was a bit nervous about what to expect. There outside of ULatina we met our host parents and went our different ways. My poor Spanish came out as soon as I met my host mother who greeted me with a hug and a smile. I would be living with her and her two children, Alonzo, 15 and Margarita, 17. Most host mothers friend had driven her and we loaded my bags into the car and she gave us a ride to my new home for the next four months. The car ride was short but rather awkward as I realized my host mother spoke not a word of English. She said a lot of things to me and while I tried to understand I couldn´t keep up and I found myself uttering ¨Si¨ and nodding my head repeatedly with a face which I´m sure read ¨I have no idea what you just said to me.¨ But although I struggled to understand her, I knew right away that she was going to be great, she was very patient and enthusiastic and smiled a lot.
Outside the house I met their small dog Tafi and went inside to find Alonzo on the couch killing zombies on his Game Cube. He mainly stayed glued to his video game but he knew bits and phrases of English, still I just continued nodding my head as she showed me around the house. My room is quite quaint but I like it just like that, I think the house is perfect for my stay here. The adaptor I brought for my laptop doesn´t work with their outlets so I´ll have to use it at the univeristy and use their computer here at home from which I´m currently typing.
Then Alvan, my host mother´s oldest son who is 24 and married with a one year old child stopped by to say hello and since he spoke English rather fluently, translate a bit. I looked at family photos and he and I had the greatest conversation about political and social matters and the U.S.´s role in the world because I was interested in hearing his perspective as a Costa Rican. He gave me great feedback and I learned a lot and found that we shared similar views especially in regard to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Our discussion was my first bit of education in Costa Rica. He is extremely intelligent and raised my interest on issues that I had never considered. He worked for some state financial organization but it was recently bought by Bank of America so he´s currently searching for a job. He´s interested in computers and wants to go back to school and eventually become a web designer so he can offer cheaper services for American companies than American workers. I told him I thought that was a great idea because you can make a good buck in computers and with someone who has intelligence I have no doubt he will succeed at that.
Alvan had lived in Utah and done mission work with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (he´s knocked on a door or two he told me) and talked to me about what the prophet has said about the U.S. immigration issue and how his family became Mormon when the met missionaries in Costa Rica. I had no idea that I would end up with a family of Mormons (with the exception of my host mother, who is a Christian but rarely attends church) in a region so dominated by Catholicism. Anyways, I have much admiration for Alvan and I told him that I felt like his heart was in the right place and that he will make a great father. I said all of this in Spanish (not really).

Around 6:30 Margarita, the 17 year old daughter of the house returned from her first day at university. Her Spanish is about as strong as Alono´s so I have a way to go but it´s coming along nicely. It was great eating dinner (the food was delicious, my host mother is an excellent cook, she works as a sort of wedding coordinator by the way) and listening to the rapid never-pausing sibling banter, though I could not pick up a word of it. It was a really great experience for me as an only child eating with a family where there are siblings just bickering and bantering away with one another, it made me happy. After dinner Alvan left, and Margarita put on the 4th Harry Potter movie and Alonzo went to play a video game on the computer. Tomorrow I´m going to roam the streets and then my host family is taking me to the rainforest at Parque Nacional Braulio Carrilo, I´m pysched. It was a truly excellent first day in Costa Rica.