San José

I have gone anywhere extraño these past few weeks, but I have managed to keep myself entertained. Last week I completed the first part of my semester here, which means that I am all done with my clases de Español and my Latin American studies. The place where I had my Spanish classes was about a two mile walk from my house, which was actually a nice way to start the morning off. The organization is called ICADS (I forget what it stands for...) but the facility was amazing. Each week, we met Monday, Wednesday and Friday for four hours of class. I would like to say that my Spanish is great now, but I am afraid that´s not the case! But I definitely learned a lot. Here are some pictures of where I took my spanish clases, including a picture of the four of us girls who were in the same level for 5 weeks.

Yesterday, I hung around San José with a few friends. We started the morning off (very early) by going to an organic farmers´market (Mom and Alison--you guys would have liked it!!) and bought a few things there, trying to do our part to support the organic farmers. We then wandered back towards the central part of downtown, passing through many larger open air markets that sold products that definitely were not organic. How do organic farmers make it? The other week my class and I visited an organic farm (the dude who runs the farm was actually at the organic market!) and the farmer told us that he does it because he likes to be in touch with the earth and it makes him feel good. But it seems like (here especially) it would be really hard to survive off of running an organic farm, which really is too bad because it makes organic products and organic farming kind of a luxury. Anyways, after the markets, my friends and I decided to have a picnic... so we got cheese, bread, yogurt and granola and a few other things. It was pretty much the best picnic ever!

The place where we had our picnic was really cool--there were even these random red structures that you could climb on if you wanted.

Tomorrow, I head to Nicaragua for two weeks. For part of the time, I will be living with a family that owns a microenterprise and we get to work with Alternativa, an organization that does microcrediting. I am pretty excited! But I will also be out of contact for a few weeks now.