Daily life :)

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

We seem to be settling into a comfortable school routine.  Each day we wake up at 6:30, a few of us shower, we get ready, eat breakfast, and make it to the bus stop by 7:15.  We’re at school by 7:45, and Spanish class begins at 8:15.  We have a 15 minute break at 10:00, and are finished at noon.  We use the hour break for lunch to run down the street to the local shop and buy lunch for $2-$4, and return and eat it while studying for the engineering quiz or playing cards.  Lecture lasts at most 2 hours, and can be a bit difficult to remain conscious toward the end, but Ron, the instructor, has a pretty good feel of when he’s lost people, and we switch to lab when that happens.  Today we made a makeshift LED flashlight!  It’s my favorite part of the day, which makes sense because I’m more competent at it than any other section :)  We end class whenever we finish the lab activities and go over the quiz, which is typically around 4:30.  We either hop on the bus or tool around for a bit, but no matter what when we board the bus we get stuck in rush hour traffic, which starts promptly at 5pm.  Today we spent an hour and a half getting home on what took us 30 minutes in the morning.  Once we get home we have dinner and hang out with the family a bit, then knock out our Spanish homework and get all our internet usage out of the way.  We’re exhausted and end up sleeping at 10:30 or 11. 

Yesterday Virginia and I stopped by KFC (which incidentally is MUCH nicer than any I’ve seen back home) to use their wifi.  I was able to have a short call home to my dad :) The call quality started out decent but deteriorated, and the ambient noise in the restaurant didn’t help much.  But it was nice to exchange even a few words!  Virginia uses a paid application through Skype and experienced much better call quality when we talked to friends back at Duke.  I might think about buying that, as it’s only $2-$3 per month.  Also we’re going to try just a regular Skype call home at a predetermined time to see if that works any better.  I have no idea when I’ll squeeze that in right now, but I’m sure I’ll make it happen.

We’re planning a group trip to Arenal this weekend!  We’ll be staying in a hotel for one night and get a guided hiking tour for $39.  We’ll still need to arrange bus tickets ($3-$4 each way), hotsprings, waterfall, and volcano visits, which shouldn’t be difficult once we’re there.  Visiting a volcano is one of the major things I wanted to do, and I can’t wait to hear about all the wildlife!

It is POURING RAIN right now!  It makes quite a bit of noise on our steel roof.  It’s quite soothing when going to sleep.  But I still need to shower and do my homework, so that’s not an option yet!  Perhaps if we have extra time we’ll play Bananagrams!