We have reached our second week in Costa Rica and third blog post. My name is Abby, and I am a Sustainability Science and Society major. I want to focus more on sustainable policy and how to organize future sustainable efforts, which makes Costa Rica a great place to learn.
While being here may seem like an extra long vacation to those reading these blogs, it is actually quite the opposite to most of us here. I am going to do a day in my life situation to share with you how I have experienced my week so far.
My day typically starts with an atrocious 6 am wake up to a very loud alarm. After laying in bed and dreading my decision to wake up early, I muster up the effort to shower and get ready to go to breakfast.
My and Isadora’s homestay situation is a bit different from everyone else’s. We are staying with a family that rents cabins to tourists for a living. This means that we get to share one of the places to ourselves, so we have our own bathroom and sleeping area. When we want to mingle with the family we just walk over to their house which doubles as the reception area. When we go in for breakfast in the morning, we normally share the space with the family and the other guests.
I either eat breakfast at 6:30 am or 7 am on the weekdays because of our class schedule. While eating a hearty meal of eggs and toast, I get to mingle with the guests, our host sister Tracy, and their cat (Amado) while waiting for my lunch. After collecting my lunch and saying my goodbyes to the family, I get to walk 5k to school. Yippee. To complete the walk from my homestay to the institute it takes around an hour, possibly closer to 50 minutes with no breaks. I normally break the walk in half, so I stop in Santa Elena which is about 20-30 minutes away. I spend some time at a coffee shop there doing my homework for the week. This allows me some time to rest and regain my energy while also being productive. About 9:30am, I start to collect myself and my belongings to get ready to walk the rest of the way. I am always sweaty when I arrive at the institute, but it is some great exercise.
Our classes for the day begin with Spanish at 10:30. The group is separated into two Spanish classes, one is for the people who are experienced with the language and the other is for beginners. I am in the beginner class which means I get to learn in the outside classroom! The Institute campus is incorporated with the surrounding forest so there are a lot of ways to experience nature but the outside classroom is my favorite. The room is almost all glass and wood and has a wooden pentagon table in the middle where we sit for class. It is a great way to learn Spanish and see the surrounding wildlife. The Spanish teachers here are wonderful too. Evelyn, Eva, and Lilliam are all wonderful at explaining the language. The more classes I have, the easier it becomes to understand and communicate with my host family and the surrounding community. Just the other day, I was helping my host mom with her math class while speaking Spanish!
After Spanish class, everyone gets a lunch break. I always enjoy the lunch my host family packs for me, my mom is a great cook. The meals can fluctuate between pasta, a mixture of rice and meat, or a sandwich. I enjoy the rice and meat combination but it is good to switch things up every so often. My favorite part of my meal is the Nutella sandwich that my host mom packs for me everyday.
The next section of classes after lunch are the Michigan Tech classes taught to us by our amazing instructor Dr. Richelle Winkler. Our first class (Population, Health, and Environment) begins at 1 pm and is 2 hours long. However, for a 2 hour class it goes by really quick. For this week, we had to choose a Latin American country and collect demographic information and explain the data. I chose Peru and the data was surprising to me. Going into this class, I definitely had biases towards certain countries just from information taught in high school and from United States news. While there are some Latin American countries that are struggling with certain issues, there are quite a few that are high up on the Happy Planet Index, meaning that the people of the country live longer, have more well being, and have less of an ecological footprint then the rest of the world. Dr. Winkler has a background in demography so her teaching is interactive and just overall fun to learn.
After a 30 minute break, we start our next class which is the Sustainability Seminar class. This class is linked with the field trips we do, so we learn about the place we are going and why it is related to sustainability. The field trips we do consist of listening to speeches and traveling to different areas. As a sustainability major, I feel at home in this class and enjoy learning about how Costa Rica is sustainable, and what they are still working on. This class is also interactive through fun activities to understand our personal impacts and different ways of thinking. For homework, we have to write about our experiences on the field trips for the week and how the people or places impact the environment and sustainability. It is a great way to see the diversity of issues and solutions.
Classes end around 4:30 pm everyday for all students, so that means that there is a large collection of people ready to walk home. After collecting ourselves, we all walk to Santa Elena in a big group. Santa Elena is where people disperse to their separate homestays so our group splits into three different ones. The Los LLanos group walks another half hour while the others get to be home in 10-15 minutes. After arriving in downtown, I tend to stay in the same coffee shop that I hang out at in the morning and do homework. The coffee shop closes at 7 pm and that is about the same time my homestay makes dinner so after about an hour or an hour and half I make the walk home. The sun also sets really early in the evening, around 6 pm, and there aren’t many street lights near where I live so it is better to walk when the sun is out. The walk home is way more enjoyable than the walk to the institute, it’s all downhill.
When I get home, I rest for a bit before dinner. My homestay family eats dinner late so we eat around 7:30 pm to 8pm. During the week my homestay mom has night classes so my homestay sister Tracy makes us dinner. The meals are always delicious and I always enjoy hanging out with her. The dad always has the news on for dinner so I always try to watch and listen to practice my Spanish. After dinner, I help clean up a little bit and then stay and talk until I am ready to go to bed. Before bed I always take a nice cold shower. The combination of heat, humidity, and walking at least six miles tends to be rough on the body. I tend to go to bed early because of pure exhaustion and the need to get up early the next morning. Even though my days are filled with walks and schoolwork, I am still enjoying my time here and I’m always so excited to start a new day!
Costa Rica study away with Michigan tech 
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