Four hours of Spanish?! What?

The first day of class, sounds ominous.. Well over all it went well, and even more importantly, it ended well.  I was worried about my Spanish class because it was a level lower than the one I wanted, but the professor is very nice. Most of the topics are review, but what I realized when the other girls who wanted to switch out asked the professor (speaking both a wish and a hypothetical situation, without using the subjunctive, for those Spanish minded of you..) was that this class is about the conversational application of the advanced grammar we already know.  With that in mind (later in the day, it took a while for the wisdom to sink in) I wrote and email to the head of the Spanish department at ASU asking if I could get credit for this level. If he says yes I might just stay at this level, but If not then I’ll try to switch.  By the way, this Spanish class goes from 8:00-12:00 in the morning. Yes four hours of Spanish, but it actually wasn’t as long as I would have thought, at least for the first day..  I met up with some other girls in the program for lunch at a pizza place near campus and then went back to my Tica house to do my homework because they all had class at 1:00.

My second class was not until 6:00 in the evening and I got to have an amazing home cooked meal of chicken, rice and beans and fried bananas!! (Oh and for breakfast my mama tica made real atola de aveda (sp?) or oatmeal to those non-hispanohablantes.) I walked back to school for my sustainable development and environmental awareness class, which was NOT in the same room as on the schedule. Another girl was lost too, but we found it pretty easily and we weren’t late due to tica time. There are 6 people in this class, and I love it. The professor is a biologist who has her masters in botany and specializes in conservation/SD work. She is young and very laid back, but passionate about her work. I like the other people in the class and I loved being in my element. I found out that there are two field trips with this class, one to tour and work at the only sustainable turtle egg farm on the cost, and the other is to the mountains to interview community members of a sustainable agrarian community that was swallowed by a national park. The two examples are to illustrate how people can work with the environment for the benefit of both, but in one case there is a conflict between the community (both predate the parks) and the national parks and in the other they work together. I am so excited for this class!! To top it all off, when Randdie and I were leaving to go back to the house we missed the shuttle (the changed the schedule—not the good part) so we decided to take a taxi since it was dark. We shared it with two other girls and we successfully navigated our way back to the house and it was only a dollar! We also got all of the keys right! Over all it was a great day to be in Pura Vida.