We arrived in Costa Rica at 6 something in the morning and one of the only things keeping us awake was probably the excitement of being in a different country. We flew though customs and immigration without any problems and proceeded to catch a bus into San Jose. This, however, is a lot more confusing than it is in the States. The buses don’t say where they are going and you have to go up and ask. It took a while to catch a bus, but we finally caught a bus and began to realize how tired we were.
Knowing this, and the great luck most of us have with directions, we got lost shortly after getting off the bus. Drew went a head in a taxi with most of our bags, gave Heather directions, and we tried to make sense of them. He had said that all we had to do was go straight and two roads would merge together and there would be a railroad and a KFC across the street. He also said it was a 15 minute walk. What we didn’t know was that it was a 15-minute walk for him. Us slow walkers take much longer to get places. After what seemed like 15 minutes, Heather began to wonder if we missed a turn or something and we asked for directions for the first time at this park outside of a gigantic church. The security guard we asked said there were not any railroads around. And so we turned around. We walked a couple more blocks, and decided that it was not that far back and asked for directions once more from a guy selling fruit on the street. He said it was two blocks in the direction of the park. The funny thing is that everyone we asked for directions said ”two blocks,” I think it might be a Costa Rica thing or they actually didn’t know what we were talking about. Eventually, we found a tourist center and asked for directions there, where we were informed that it was actually 10 blocks away.
We ran into Drew outside of the National Museum, where he told us that all we had to do was go straight, nothing else. After that, we had our first restaurant experience, which went pretty well, and then walked to the hostel.
The hostel we stayed in the first night was the nicest hostel most of us had ever stayed in. I believe it was the house of an ex-president of Costa Rica. It had a pool; a hammock and this really cool seating area outside. We hung around for a while, sun bathed and took naps until we went to exchange money, get a cell phone that worked in Costa Rica, et something to eat, and buy journals or Spanish dictionaries.
We slept like logs that night, but were completely rested. We went to this cute bakery for breakfast and enjoyed some of the best orange juice we have ever had and lot of different pastries. We went to the National Museum after that and spent about an hour there. After that we got on a bus and headed to Guapeles, which I may have spelled wrong. We went straight to our hotel after arriving, went to dinner and went to sleep.
We met Don Angel the next morning along with a couple other boys from the community. We ate breakfast with them, played charades in the restaurant and began our journey to Roxanna.
The rest of our story here will be told by the other students on the trip, since it is both late and I have written a short novel so far.
Until next time,
Lenora
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