Good Stuff from Rene: Volume 11 – Well, I’m back

So I’m back. I’m not going to lie – last week was ROUGH. It never occurred to me that I’d have a hard time adjusting to being back home, to the cold weather, to the routine. Seriously, I didn’t even consider it. But it hit me, HARD. I didn’t feel like myself again until Friday.

All that said, I did NOT have trouble adjusting to being in Costa Rica. Here’s a quick rundown of the trip (minus “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened”).

• I stayed with a great family! The house belonged to an older woman (henceforth referred to as “Mama Tica”). The description I received ahead of time wasn’t 100% accurate (or 50% for that matter), so it took me awhile to figure out who everyone was. (Seriously – it took me more than a week to figure out they had a live-in housekeeper.) Mama Tica had a daughter (around my age), a son-in-law and two grand-daughters (11 and 3 months). Everyone but the son-in-law stayed there during the week. There was a lot of very fast Spanish speaking. If I could figure out the topic of their conversations with each other, I was happy.
• The school was fantastic. All of the faculty and administrators were really, really nice and helpful. The school was bustling all day and into the evening (Spanish learners in the mornings and English learners in the afternoon and evenings), so it was fun to be there. The school arranged tours, cooking classes, dancing classes and other activities that I participated in. (I loved the architecture, too – in some places there were no doors, so you were inside, and then you were outside. This went along perfectly with the awesome weather.)
• I loved speaking Spanish!! I was in a class of four each week with Carmen, our teacher. We learned ALL THE THINGS. But really, just present tense the first week (which was killing me because I couldn’t talk about the things I did in the past!). During the second week we learned the past tense along with por/para and ser/estar. (Both confusing to me.) I love being in class though, so I got into the groove really quickly. I started reading Fluent Forever and hope to implement some of the suggestions to continue working on my Spanish. I signed up for a local Spanish-speaking meetup in a few weeks, too.
• The other students were SUPER interesting. A bunch of us went on a weekend tour together and the group consisted of: two 66-year-olds from Indiana/Illinois who were there for two weeks, a grad-student from Boston who is now working on a 6-month project in another part of Costa Rica, a woman from the Czech Republic who is traveling indefinitely and three Germans (who have really awesome vacation, jobs with sabbaticals and speak English REALLY well). It was awesome to get to know all of them. 
• The country is beautiful. I stayed in a smallish town outside of the capital (San Jose) called Heredia. One of my favorite things each morning was walking out of my homestay, being in a town and seeing mountains in the distance. It got me every single time. I loved taking my time walking through town on my way to and from class every day. I also took a weekend trip to a volcano (Arenal) and rainforest (Monteverde) and minus the terrible winding, bumpy roads, the scenery was gorgeous. (The differences between there and home are interesting, too – they are BIG into recycling, there’s no hot water in the sink, there are LOTS of bars on the houses and windows, pedestrians do NOT have the right-of-way, etc.)
• I may still be searching for my why. I had planned the trip so early in 2017 that by the time it rolled around, I wasn’t really all that excited about it. Plus, I wasn’t sure why I had booked it to begin with. During the first week, I think I expected something to happen – some enlightenment from above. THEN I would know why I went and what I was supposed to do now. But since life doesn’t work like that, it didn’t happen. I stressed a bit during the second week that I wasn’t sad and homesick enough. I really didn’t want to leave and cried when it was time to go. And, like I said, it took me awhile to recuperate. I think my sadness is an indicator that I need to incorporate something from my life there in my life here, but I’m not 100% sure what that is yet.

And I took a few photos. Actually I took a ton – here are a few for you.

I wrote a thing about thinking about what you want your website to do before you build it. Read it here. (Really, though, it’s a metaphor for life. Think about what you want, set some goals, make a plan and then act.)

I’m a fan of Cait Flanders and although this is a guest post, this article about learning to see the world is a must-read.

As always, thanks for reading! 

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