day 1

This is my second night with my tico familia. My mama ticas name is Damaris; she is about 8 months younger than me. She has been married to my papa tico Warner for almost 5 years and they have a 2-year-old son named Daniel. The house is much bigger than I expected, 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms (not sure if the master bedroom has a bathroom or not). I was lucky enough to have wifi so I can do homework and talk to my family and friends back home easier. This is how my first night went…

I was picked up around 5:45 from CPI (school) and the drive only took about 5-8 minutes. Driving is way different here, they don’t always follow the lights and there are NO street signs. Not joking- I don’t have an address that I know of. Everything here is based off landmarks. You adjust much faster than one would expect. During our drive home I very quickly realized that my mama tica spoke no English.  This kind of panicked me for a little while because I expected them to at least know basic phrases since they volunteered to have an American stay with them. Hindsight makes me feel dumb for thinking that because I went to a Latin American country with very limited Spanish language skills. My papa however spoke pretty good English so he would help us chat. After getting home and shown my room (attached to what would be equivalent to an American sunroom- full size bunk beds, and my own bathroom), met their pet rabbit. The rabbit just lives in the backyard, it is one of the biggest rabbits I’ve ever seen and their fence is stone so it cannot escape. I hung out with my papa for about 2 hours.  He went to his room to play a computer game and my mama tica came out after, we used Google translate to talk…or text, whichever you think is more fitting. This was very helpful however as most translators go it didn’t always make sense. This gave us lots of laughs but also some confusion.  It a great thing that laughter is a language everyone speaks. After a while I showered and went to bed. At 4 am I was woke up by a rooster that was going crazy! I was in and out of sleep for a long time and it took me a solid 20 minutes to figure out what the sound was.  I could tell my family was waking up around 5 because I could hear banging around the kitchen. Finally got out of bed at 6:45 and once I was ready my mama tica and I walked to school.

            Once the general nervousness and awkwardness went away we had a good first night. Though this first night I learned that there is always a way to solve a communication problem.  There were bumps and puzzled expression filling the whole night but we started to figure each other out. I only interacted with them for about 3 hours before bed, the second day (today) was much better. Our 4 hours of Spanish class got my brain working overtime and I was remembering more vocabulary than I did before so once I got home I was able to practice with my mama tica. We still had Google translate off to the side but it was so much better. I feel comfortable trying to use my Spanish at home now. I was very very timid the first night. It felt like I couldn’t remember anything at all. 

By the way as I’m typing this my tico brother is standing next to me trying to type at the same time as me.  He is just the cutest little thing, beyond hyper all the time though.  

Heres his message to you all: 65o8897777uyiyhgbvc xigt./wfwdf rwwwghhzgast

Daniel and Myself playing with photo booth on my mac