Pura vida!

Saludos de Costa Rica!

As I write this, I am laying in a hammock in the common room of our hostel in downtown San Jose. It's only 7 AM here, but I've already been up for a full hour, and with the exception of Chad, the only other ICYE volunteer who's arrived so far and a fellow American, I was the last person in our room of 12 to get out of bed. (As far as I know, he's still out cold.)

I arrived at Juan Santamaria airport yesterday around 1:30 and was met outside by two respresentatives from ACI, the local branch of ICYE. They drove me to the ACI office in San Jose, where Chad had already been waiting for a couple hours. All of the Americans who are traveling abroad through ICYE this year met in July at our training weekend in Boston, so we already knew each other; Katie and Dakota are the other two girls from the US coming to Costa Rica and both should be getting in tonight (yay!!).

After hanging out with the ACI staff for a while, we met with Jorge, a local university student who volunteers through ICYE and will be our guide for the next couple days. Jorge brought us back to the hostel in a cab, and then took us out for a short tour. We walked for a little while, and then hopped in a cab and drove across town to a bar, where I was able to drink because the legal age here is 18. Around 7, we headed back to the hostel for dinner and soon after I was ready to crash, since I had left my house at 4 AM Costa Rican time.

Now I'm just waiting for the manager to unlock the gates for the day so that I can go for a walk around the neighborhood. I'm sure that she would let me out if I asked, but I have no idea how to say that in Spanish and we already tried to have a conversation about coffee earlier this morning that didn't go too well language barrier-wise. But I still have plenty of time, because Jorge doesn't come to pick us up until 10 for our day of sightseeing.

I'm eyeing a computer over in the corner that looks like it may have been made in 1995, but may have a USB port for me to upload pictures. We'll see.