Yesterday was our last full day in Manuel Antonio, and essentially, my last day on vacation. We all took the day kind of easy. I swam a lot in the pool where I met a lovely family from Barcelona and a young couple from Los Angeles. She was an ER surgeon and he was a lawyer, so high achievers. I also got a massage. The women at the massage place were super nice, and I left smelling faintly like watermelon and kiwi. There was a sloth hanging on a rope while I swam and I got some decent pictures of it. We also got some family pictures before we went out to eat.
I left a beautiful and expensive hotel at 10am this morning and drove 7 hours to the area around Arenal. I’m now staying in a dorm room that smells a little musty on the campus of the Technological University of Costa Rica. Accommodations are definitely not the same, but I have a space the holds 8 students all to myself. It has a shower, a kitchen area, and an AC. I also got the coffee maker to make water for my tea, so all of my essentials are met, and I’m having a wonderful time. There are 4 beds in my room and a tiny bathroom. It would be rough to live here as a student, but it’s fine for me alone. I don’t know if the shower has hot water yet. This area of Costa Rica is absolutely beautiful and the campus is nice. It’s not as fancy as US universities, but it’s well-maintained. You can get a very good education without all of the expensive bells and whistles that we provide in the US for students. There is a lichee tree right beside my apartment and there were parrots flying over when I sat outside for a while before dinner at a local bar with my Costa Rican counterpart.
Tomorrow morning, I’m having breakfast in the student dining center on my own, then I have a full day of meetings with people in programs I don’t know anything about. I start with Engineering and Computer Science. I spent part of my evening watching UNI’s promotional videos about our programs so I can talk about them. I have a page full of notes. Not all of my counterparts here speak English so some of my meetings will be at least partly in Spanish. I’m hoping that works in my favor. Rather than looking stupid because I had to Google search actuary science because I couldn’t remember exactly what that was, maybe I’ll just seem bad at Spanish. I’m still not completely sure what all is incorporated into geospatial technologies or the difference between information science and traditional computer science.
I’ll let you all know how it goes. Right now, I need to see if there is hot water in the shower or not and maybe Google search information science.
Update: That’s a no on the hot water. Tomorrow, I’ll leave the AC off until I take a shower.
Traveling with Emily! 