Today has been pretty cool. All of the students met in the morning at the LASP (Latin America Semester Program) headquarters where we will be having our Core Seminar every Tuesday and Thursday. The Core Seminar, as I understand it, is kind of a broad class that will be going over history and cultural things of Latin America and Costa Rica in particular. We mostly just had an orientation today where we went over some of what's to come during our first 6 weeks and some security stuff. After lunch, we played a pretty fun culture game where we split up into two groups and were given a list of rules for how our "culture" operates and some different cards that served as money. We were on separate floors of the building and had our little economy card trading thing going and then every 3 minutes we would have some people from our group go to visit the group downstairs that had entirely different rules, customs, and cards than us and they would send 3 from their group to us. The purpose of the visitors was to try to 'figure out' the rules of the culture and pretty much what was going on. The other group from mine that I got to visit had some rule that foreign guys aren't supposed to approach women, so when I went to visit and walked up to a group of girls, I was immediately told that I needed to leave by the head honcho guy. Afterwards we had some good discussions about how we classify other cultures as good or bad or better or worse... I felt like there really wasn't a conclusion reached other than that we should be cautious when making judgments and try our best to be flexible and understanding of things we don't understand.
After class I went to a small super market with Alba and Spencer (a student in my program that is now one of my neighbors) and got some 2 in 1 shampoo/conditioner and some soap. They didn't have any bodywash or shaving cream so I'm probably just going to be using a lot of bar soap....
I've got some homework that I'll need to do this weekend but honestly, my schedule is pretty much empty for the weekend aside from going to the Catholic church with Alba on Sunday.
Oh yeah. Every day for the next 6 weeks I will have my language class with 3 or 4 other students. It's about a 30-45 minute walk from the LASP headquarters where we have the core seminar or potentially an hour long bus ride because of the way the bus routes work... so I'll probably be walking there with a group every morning which might be fun or might be awful- not sure yet.
I got my suitcase as well today so that's cool.
Whelp, that's about all I can think of to say... I'll post as interesting things happen...
peace!
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