Every night is a weekend night.

I've realized that bringing my laptop to class has the same effect here as it does in the United States - I don't listen as much. But I've decided it's the only way I'm going to get through three hour classes, and we have six hours worth of class today. The morning class wasn't that bad. It was about political risk analysis and governability of countries, and it was interesting, but I still can't sit in class for three hours. The coffee break helps. It's actually awesome, getting caramel empanadas and watermelon juice and other finger foods and eating outside by the pool...but it makes me not want to go back inside.

So I'm inside learning about cultural differences in organizational theory right now, and we have class until 5 and then we have dinner at a nice restaurant at 6:30.

We planned our weekend excursion today. It's 67 dollars for hotel and transportation for two nights. Basically, dirt cheap. We're living in Alajuela, and we're going to Puerto Viejo, which is about five and a half hours south on the Caribbean coast.

I'm staying with Elise in a double room, but there are two suites that are four-person rooms with a pool inside the room and a few other insane amenities. We wanted that, obviously, but there are about six of us who would have wanted to room together and that would have sucked to leave two people out of the awesome room. It is very cool that all 30 of us are going on the same weekend excursion, though. The bus ride there and back is going to suck - the roads here are really bumpy, and it's hard not to feel a little bus-sick on even a one hour ride like we've had - but I can't wait to lay on the beach for two days. We really haven't had much sun time, with all the classes, meals and events, and since it gets dark at 5 or 6, which is when we get out of class. I've only laid out for maybe 45 minutes maximum at a time so far.

Yesterday night was great. We rented a bus and all of us went to the Fiesta Casino.
It was like a party bus - and only five dollars per person round trip, which was definitely cheaper than a taxi. I didn't actually gamble, and the dance floor was pretty lame - we were the only ones dancing, and I know they were all thinking, Stupid Americans - but the bar was fun.

We just sat around and chilled, and I tried to get everyone to dance but it was mostly just the girls - the guys kind of sat around like middle schoolers.

Bilingual coffee shop tours.

So I guess I’m over the tons-of-assignments thing. Some of the students went to talk to the course coordinator about it and she said she’d talk to us after our morning class tomorrow, so we’ll see what happens.


I really like driving through Costa Rica. We're in a huge valley, so we drive through the cities and there are mountains surrounding us. We're visiting a volcano in a few weeks, so we'll get to be up there, but it's just really mountainous and there are a lot of forests and it's gorgeous.

Almost all the houses we drive by are gated up, like this one. Most have barbed wire on the top. Their yards are just completely gated in and it's a little creepy at first, but these are pretty nice houses. It's just customary here, but it definitely looks a little weird.


Anyway, last night was pretty fun. It was a Monday night and we got back too late to really consider renting a bus or taxi to go out, so we started at Alex’s place and then the party moved to our six-person house. The awesome thing was, every person in our program ended up coming over – we’re all doing things as a 30-person group, so that’s pretty cool. We just had our Costa Rican drinks and played a huge game of Kings, which was a little anticlimactic because it took about 5 minutes to get through each card.

The houses are so non-soundproof that we can hear what the guys in the next house, 100 feet away, are saying – so I’m sure the entire campus could hear our party. We’re in married housing, so there are little kids running around a few cabins down, and we’re probably the last people they want around – a bunch of rowdy American semi-alcoholics.

The party started at 8ish and ended around 10:30, but a few stragglers stayed outside our house and talked until maybe midnight. Sure, it seems a little lame that the party ended so early, but we did have to be in the cafeteria by 8:15 this morning, and it gets dark here at about 6 p.m. – so it already feels like midnight by about 8 at night.

We end up doing so much stuff per day that it feels like it’s impossible to write one blog post a day about it. Our first class was today – it was about Foreign Direct Investments in Costa Rica. It was a three hour class, and our professor was super-animated and kept swearing. The topic was only semi-interesting to me…I’m not so much into the economics-based stuff, and the lesson was wayyy long. But we had a coffee break at 10:30 – and I’ve officially decided those are the coolest meals of the day.

It’s really air conditioned in the classrooms, so to go outside by the pool when it’s 90 degrees out in the early morning is awesome. They serve us little finger food and different juice – yesterday it was guava, but today I just had ginger ale - and the finger food is amazing, just like different cookies and wraps. It feels like how I think tea time in England should be.

Anyway, the lesson was all right, considering I have the attention span of a 5 year old. We had lunch and then went to Cafe Britt for a company tour.

The company tour was a little ridiculous. They served us coffee liquor pretty much the second we walked in, and it was the most touristy thing I’ve ever done. They had a tour with professional actors, who showed us how the factory made coffee – we walked through the mini coffee plantation and they walked us through step by step – then we saw in the factory. And then they had this insane show about the history of coffee. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but there were ridiculous costumes, and here’s a picture of one of the actors dressed as the Pope with a naked guy in the background.


Yeah. Pretty much sums up the ridiculousness of the tour.

Then we got to talk with the CEO of the company, and had tamales and free drinks while he talked in this pavilion attached to the factory.

Everything in Costa Rica is half-outside. The whole campus is barely indoors, the hallways are just covered walkways and even the cafeteria is one big pavilion. It’s awesome.

We’ve started to talk to a few more of the Costa Rican students. I really want to practice my Spanish, but they’re all MBA students and they know English, so they just speak English to us. They play soccer a few times per week in a stadium a few minutes away and they invited us to come play during the next three weeks, so we might end up doing that. It’s great talking to them because we know what bars are good and bad what nights – like the bar we’re going to tonight apparently lets ladies drink free on Mondays. Too bad we didn’t know that yesterday.

We’re starting to plan our weekend trip, and we’re going to the Caribbean side of the country. It’s really far south, and it’s a five and a half hour drive, but it’s going to be amazing. More details on that later, I guess.

And we’re about ready to head out to the casino/bar tonight, so I’m pretty pumped about that.

This is insane.

So our course coordinator just emailed us the "syllabus." Too bad we don't have enough free time in the day now that 6 hours of class per day has started to do all of this:

1) Question set 1: due Tuesday, May 6 at 1:55pm
Two essay-style questions and complete answers (about 250-500 words each) about one or more of the sessions from the previous week.
2) Essay 1 (at least 1000 words) due Wednesday, May 7 at 8:55am
3) Question set 2: due Monday, May 12 at 9pm
Two essay-style questions and complete answers (about 250-500 words each)--one about the sessions from the previous week, plus one about one of the three site visits to this point.
4) Essay 2 (at least 1000 words) due Wednesday, May 14 at 9pm
5) Question set 3: due Thursday, May 15 at 1:55pm
Two essay-style questions and complete answers (about 250-500 words each) about one or more of the sessions or site visits from this week.
Final exam: The final exam will take place the morning of May 16, from 9am-12pm. It will be a hand-written, essay-style exam, based largely on questions students have written.
Grading of Assignments and Exam: Assignments will comprise 25% of your grade. Each essay counts for 8% of your grade; each question set, 3%. Essays are letter-graded, based on quality and thoughtfulness of content (75%), and writing style (25%). Question sets will be graded on a check, check plus, check minus scheme.

Some essay topic ideas are below, but you may write on any topic you want, provided it is relevant to Latin American economy or business. Please explain in your essay how the topic is relevant, if it is not obvious. Feel free to write on Costa Rica, one other Latin American country, or some set of countries, while striving for some depth. Use class materials, internet resources (try Google scholar, too!—try to read an academic econ or business paper), books, or interviews with local students or people, and cite your sources.

...and she goes on to list 32 ideas that are mainly based around economics (because she's an economics phD candidate, not even in the bschool) and are completely boring. The library here closes at like 8 p.m. There are four computers, and not everyone brought their laptops. We really don't have much free time now that classes have started, maybe an hour between sessions. She told us to use that to write our papers. ... Right.

And I am not busting my ass on 1000-word essays and 500-word responses (two of them) and three assignments per week for things that are only worth like 8% per essay when I get 40% just for showing up to class.

Is she out of her mind? Seriously?

Settling in.

We have a house cleaner who makes our beds and cleans our bathrooms every day, and it's pretty awesome. Not like I'm messy to begin with, but it's almost like a hotel here. Again, so much better than Ann Arbor.

All they do here is feed us. Empanadas, rice and beans, and fruit. I think I already said that the fruit here is amazing. And on the tour of downtown San Jose today, I probably counted 20 KFCs. If I were a Costa Rican, I would have picked a better American fast food franchise to take over my country, but that’s just me.

The tour this afternoon was really lame. We had to stay on the bus the whole time because the city was too dangerous for us to walk around, apparently, yet we’re encouraged to go down there and explore in our free time. The city was pretty cool, but again, it would have been nice to not see it just on the bus. The roads of San Jose are super narrow, so it felt like we were going to run into the cars next to us. There were these ridiculous colored bull statues in the middle of the city, and tons of palm trees, and a lot of cramped little shops...and that was pretty much it. San Jose wasn’t really the city full of street vendors and bustling crowds that I was expecting. A lot of car dealerships and industrial businesses, mainly.



We went to Escazu after that, the city that's supposed to be the nightlife capital of Costa Rica, or at least our central part of it. We didn't see much.

They dropped us off at the mall, which was full of mostly Central American stores (with mediocre clothing) but a few American stores, like Payless and Reebok. None of us wanted to be at the mall - we wanted to be walking around outside, but it's the first day here and I guess they’re still working things out. I bought a donut kabob (not the real name) with caramel on it, since I was starving since all I really had for lunch was fruit (I'm trying to live on pineapple...I guess it’s not working) and I actually could understand how much it was and counted out the change, so I didn’t feel as stupid as I had earlier in the day.

I can understand all the signs here, and I can read all the brochures, but I’m lost once people start talking. It’s just way too fast for me. Forget about years of Spanish and being told that I can call myself "fluent"...yeah, right. I feel like a total idiot trying to listen to a native Costa Rican and answering, but I’ve been able to get by.

So the mall was semi-boring until we hit the supermercado. It was one of the anchor stores. And...there was a huge alcohol aisle. Deciding what to buy was like, one of the hardest decisions I've had to make this month. There was so much, and I'm legal here, and it was just so awesome. So we bought a bunch of Costa Rican alcohol (I wasn't even carded), and we're about to go to 137 to celebrate our first full night here.



Hasta luego!

Bienvenidos a Costa Rica.

So this trip is definitely the coolest thing that has ever happened to me and I've only been here for about 12 hours.

Yesterday. I was afraid I wouldn't make friends because it felt like everyone already knew each other during the orientation...but from the minute I got to the gate at Metro, I met three other people who were going on the trip and we've all gotten along really well. I sat next to Lusa on the way down to Dallas and I was around a few other people on the trip, and by the time we hit Dallas, we had a group of about 15 people on our flight to Costa Rica. We all ate at Chili's at the airport during our layover and got to know each other.

I've always wanted to go to Texas, and obviously we were only there for a few hours and couldn't leave the airport, but at least the Dallas airport goes along with every Texas stereotype I've ever known. The crazy cowboy souvenir shops, the little kids and huge dudes in cowboy hats, the southern accents. It was pretty sweet.

The flight to Costa Rica took four hours, on top of the three we'd already spent flying to Dallas. We landed in San Jose at 10:00, and I couldn't really see much but it looked like we were flying over the water...but it really looked like nothing, it was way different from flying over anything in the U.S. at night. Barely any lights. We were all bouncing off the wall, though, so the second we touched down we started squealing...yeah, mature, I know.

We met our course coordinator, Brooke, at the airport and these guys loaded all of our luggage onto one white pickup truck...the luggage was piled higher than the car and it looked absolutely hilarious, like there was no way it would stay in the car on the freeway. It was only a few minutes to the INCAE campus, and we got our cabin assignments and they dropped us off near the cabins...so we all started wandering to our houses in the dark. I had to take off my fleece right away. It was pretty much midnight, and it was still so hot I was sweating in a short-sleeved shirt.

So we found out pretty quickly that Alajuela has a moderately bad ant problem. Amanda and Kristen left their luggage by our place while they looked for their cabin...bad idea, since there are apparently giant anthills all over the place that we couldn't see in the dark. The ants crawled up their suitcases, up their pant legs and into their cabin when they brought the luggage in...so their house is carpeted with dead ants. They came over awhile later to warn us, and once we started noticing the ants, we saw the sidewalks swarming with bugs in the dark...pretty disgusting. Janelle suggested bug spraying our beds, but we settled for just spraying under the main door.

We walked around to a few of the other houses late last night to say hi - and we definitely got the best house. Most people are living two to a cabin and share a bathroom, and their houses are pretty small and a little dingy. Our house looks like it could be on the Real World.

There are six girls in it, and we each have our own bedroom and our own bathroom - which we definitely weren't expecting. It's nicer than my room at school. We were told we'd have roommates and that there'd be eight girls to a house, so I was thinking it'd be like a house in the middle of nowhere with, like, concrete floors and four little bedrooms. Not at all. My room is upstairs, and I have my own little private stairs up to my room. The bathroom is tiled with a glass shower, and they provided soap and towels for us.

The whole house has really high ceilings and a lot of natural light. It has tile floors, a huge living room area in the middle, a fridge/freezer and a tiny kitchen space. When we walked in last night, there were Oreos ("galletas de chocolate con crema sabor y vainilla") and Ritz crackers provided for all of us, and Cokes and water in the fridge. Everyone else from the different cabins keeps dropping in and saying hi, especially since we have one of the biggest houses. Seriously...I'm thinking about transferring here.

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This morning. We had to be down on campus at 7:30 for breakfast...I almost missed it, I slept in until 7:20. Way to start off well. We're a little wary about eating the food down here, especially drinking the water and eating raw fruits/vegetables, but the staff has said it's safe to drink the water and have ice on campus. I'm still only drinking bottled water, but I tried guava this morning and it was awesome. We had a rice-and-beans dish that I can't remember the name of, but I really should since I claim to know Spanish...and fruit that was absolutely amazing, pineapple and papaya and mango. I'm speaking a little Spanish but I feel like the biggest fool, like I don't know anything. I'm getting a few stares because I'm the only blonde girl on this trip, let alone probably in all of Alajuela.

We took a tour of campus after breakfast, and it's absolutely gorgeous.




We're taking a tour of downtown San Jose and Escazu this afternoon, which is where all the nightlife is. It's about a half hour away. We had a brief intro to our class this morning, but all we've really done is lay out, eat Costa Rican food and get to know each other. Rough life.