Happy Fourth of July!

I have been in Costa Rica for a couple of days now. I still haven´t seen the beautiful parts of the country, but the area that I am in seems really cool. I will try to give as thorough of an update as I can, but details may have escaped me and I have to type really fast because other people want to use the computer. For the last couple of days I have been hanging out at ICADS (the Spanish school). I have my Spanish class in the afternoon and in the mornings I do cultural activities. Well, we haven´t done any actual activities yet because we are still going over stuff like safety and what we will be doing for community service and volunteer work (there is a difference between the two- community service= group somewhat mandatory/expected of us and volunteer=individual work with a local organization). I found this one that I really like with a Quaker organization here. On the description sheet it said that in the past ICADS students have done stuff like teaching forms of nonviolent protests to Nicaraguan immigrants, worked with human rights, and some stuff with the environment. There are a lot of other choices but they have to do with working with kids and I don´t do well with kids for very long.

A little bit about my family now. My host mom is really nice. She makes good food. Nearly every meal in Costa Rica contains rice and beans- together it is called Gallo Pinto. I have eggs with GP for breakfast, dinner with some sort of fish or potatoes with GP, and I am sure that I would have GP for lunch but we usually go out to eat for lunch.

My fourth of July was really uneventful. The ambassodor throws a party for all the Americans every Fourth so a bunch of us squeezed into some taxis and drove a good half an hour to forty-five minutes to the Ambassador´s house and we noticed that nothing was giong on in there so we asked the guards if there was a party and they said that the party was in the morning and that we missed it. I didn´t know that anyone has Fourth parties in the morning. So we drove all the way back to San Pedro and went to this Jazz club. It was really cool. There was a live band and- I have to go for a tour of San Pedro.
Ciao (They use ciao here)