Good bye EF LA, hello EF Playa Tamarindo!

Today is Monday which means I should have been working at EF LA and instead, I took a placement test and explored the surrounding area of EF Playa Tamarindo. It´s nice to be out of San Jose and on with my adventure.

Yesterday I took a 6 hour adventure from San Jose to Playa Tamarindo. I call it an adventure because the trip began with my sister and I being picked up at our hostel exactly at the time the EF staff had told us the transfer service would greet us. We thought it was terrific that they were on time and we assumed the rest of the afternoon-evening would be the same. We were wrong. We headed to the airport to pick up a student and due to flight delays, we ended up waiting there for nearly two hours. The San Jose airport is small and since they don´t let greeters stand inside the airport everyone stands outside a series of large windows. The EF greeter who wasn´t wearing an EF shirt proceeded to write the student´s name on a piece of paper, borrow some tape from someone who was at the airport greeting someone else, and then stick the sign to the window! He then walked away since we still had about an hour before the student´s flight was meant to arrive. Hilarious! How was the student supposed to know who had put up the sign? With so many other greeters, how was the student going to see the very plain and ugly sign? My sister and I felt like we had to stand there and look out for someone who could potentially be a student from anywhere in the world (we were guessing the person was German because of the name, but based on looks, that meant nothing and we weren´t sure out name guessing was correct anyways). Somehow the plain signed work and we all spotted each other. The journey from San Jose to Playa Tamarindo took a little over 4 hours. The roads were paved most of the way but the last hour or so the road was made of dirt and bumpy. The entertainment system was fairly good...we watched Madonna music videos most of the way...until the music system died, along with the lights on the van. We were taken to the school at which point the student went to her room at the residence and a taxi was called to take my sister and I to our host families. We assumed the van with no lights was deemed unsafe on the unlit dirt roads.

The taxi driver thought he knew where my host family was. He stopped and I got out and put on my backpack and a woman came out of her house and she clearly had no idea what was going on. It turns out that I was nearly in the woman´s yard before we realized she wasn´t an EF host family and had no clue who I was. Terrific. Luckily I had the number to my host family and the taxi driver called it and we drove for a few more minutes and then stopped where someone was standing. My host family is very nice! They live in a nice house in Santa Rosa. My sister lives in a different host family down the road. I´ll write more about my host family later. I´m actually proud of my Spanish skills...I spoke no English last night and understood almost everything the family said.

This morning my host mom dropped me off down the road at the EF bus stop. There´s an EF shuttle that picks up students from their host families! It´s great! We got to the school at about 7:30. I´ll write more about the school later. I will mention that it´s beautiful! It looks like a resort. There´s a pool in the center of the school! My sister and I are the only students from the United States. It feels great to be the only Americans! Sadly though, everyone speaks English with each other when they´re not in class. It´s good for everyone else because they get to improve their English and their Spanish but it´s kind of a bummer for me since I want to improve my Spanish. Okay, I will write more tomorrow. I feel bad that I´m sitting on the computer and not in the living room interacting with my host family!

I promise I´ll write more detailed posts later.