A Smile is the Same in Every Language

My lesson learned today is one: don't forget where you live in a foreign country and two: a smile and laughter have the same meeting no matter the language. I started my day off very early in order to eat breakfast and go on a walking tour of San Jose and visit Cafe Britt, a coffee company. My alarm was going off at 6:30 (I don't think I've gotten up that early since high school). Anyways my host family walked my floor mate and me to the university to meet with the other students in our program and our director.

Study Abroad Group Walking Tour of San Jose

After the walking tour, we were off to try some coffee in Heredia located in the Central Valley, north of San Jose. I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but this stuff was definitely something special. We learned all the steps to making a delicious cup of coffee. You must use Arabica coffee beans; nothing else will do. Coffee plants first arrived to Costa Rica in 1791.When the tour was over we had an outstanding lunch at Cafe Britt's restaurant with the usual Costa Rican staples and even some plantain with a syrup covering it.

Coffee Plant

On the bus ride back from Heredia, we stopped at an open market in San Jose. I was walking back from the market with another girl, and I could not remember what my host family's house looked like because many of the houses here are very similar and they aren't marked with numbers. Nearly every house has a gate outside of it because during the 1980s the government tried to scare people into thinking they were going to be robbed (I learned this from my program director). Directions in Costa Rica are usually given by landmarks and not necessarily street names and numbers. Luckily I was able to find some other girls in the program who took me to their homestay where I used the WiFi. They even had their host mom call my host parents and my host dad came to pick me up with one of his daughters. That was pretty embarrassing especially since I had walked right past my house and not even known it. Finally when the long day of touring was over, I played charades and pictionary with my host family. We had a good time laughing, and I realized that even if we can't understand each other a lot of the time, a simple smile or a burst of laughter can go a long way. 

Pura Vida.