Day 3 - Monday, May 12, 2008

First day of school. My alarm scared the hell out of me and Colby when the vibrating end of the clock started going insane on top of the TV, that was a nice wake up for sure. So we met the girls a little later than planned so no breakfast, checked out, and took a cab to school.
The alphabet killed me, since I hadn't had to worry about remembering any of that shit in 2 years, but we moved on to numbers and talked about that for most of 3 hours, hence why we called it the "retard class," the other "retard class" did the alphabet almost the entire time.
Anyway, the other new people were getting pretty mad at me at first, or jealous maybe, because I just raced through everything and kept having to sit there while they struggled and I'd have to wait for everyone to catch up. They also weren't happy because that made them all try to speed up and I guess it prohibited them from taking their time to really learn it, but fuck man... I took 3 semesters of Spanish and worked in the outlet mall with all the Mexicano customers, no shit that I had numbers and math down.
We finally got to verbs at the end and that is where I fell back in line for the day.
After that we talked about what to watch for in Costa and all that and had our real orientation, where he talked about the shit we would have to deal with in host families and the horrors of it. So we were all pretty nervous having already heard about bats and rats and shitty families.
For roommates and host families and shit... naturally i was paired up with Jamieson (of all people... God i was pissed off). So i talked to Buddy afterwards about my foot, which was rapidly starting to swell and turning green... sexy... and Jamieson was still around so i couldn't talk then. Then a few minutes later, while hiding from Jamieson, I waited to talk to Buddy and finally started asking if I could change houses or something. He asked if it was dire enough to not give it a go just for one night, and i said it wasn't. he said he thought it was great that i called out Jamieson in front of him about my having to save his ass the first night. Anyway, so I went to the house with Jamieson and Dale, our other roommate. The dad was friendly in that man of the hosue kind of way... however you may describe that. and the mom was very nice, but didn't speak a word of enlighs. later we found out there were girls already living with them, one from Switzerland... never found out what her name was... and one from Canada, Kristin.
Us guys walked around Quepos after getting settled in and finding some off-brand neosporin and gauze for my foot. The area really was the ghetto of Quepos, which I discovered a bit more about later on in the night. But there were also some great views, and my first view of total poverty, a guy using a bucket and a water drain to give himself a bath on teh side of the street in a ditch.
Anyway, so then we went home and at 7 she fed us dinner. us 3, Kristin - 29, and Swiss - 33 year old surfer traveling for the hell of it. She speaks German, French, England and is working now on Spanish). Anyway, dinner was some kind of fish, which wasn't all that bad after being drowned in hot sauce. also rice, beans (which Kristin got me to eat a bit after a good amount of peer pressure), salad, beets, some exotic veggiesand friend plantanes. It wasn't bad, and I tried some of everything, menos the beets.
The guys went to sleep after that and the girls and I went to the Byblos Casino in Manuel Antonio, which is more like a bar than a casino, and partied there until Kristin and I followed the other Texas State kids and left at 1230. Before we left I watched a game of blackjack in the room received for the casino. They found out it was my first time in any kind of casino and everyone in there congratulated me with a drink. So we got home and went to sleep.
ok i forgot to mention, on teh way to the buses we had to pass a ton of crackheads who were scattered over both sides of the street, we walked in the middle of the road and "walked with a purpose" in order to avoid them.