One week in: Where to begin?

Nothing is ever what you expect it to be.

Every morning, I still have problems comprehending that I am waking up in a completely different country. People have been telling me for a while now that I will miss things that I didn’t expect to miss, that I will be most surprised by things that aren’t even really that exciting—but I have to say, I really didn’t believe them until now.

For example: I never imagined myself brushing my teeth in my host parents’ bathroom. For that matter, I never imagined anything having to do with a bathroom in Costa Rica; in my pre-departure imagination, I assumed that I would be too busy learning to surf to care about the upkeep of a fresh and minty mouth. But the fact of the matter is, I am not just vacationing here. I am living here, breathing in the polluted air of San Pedro on the bus every day to school and bringing the lunch my mama tica kindly prepares for me and, in general, getting used to the idea that this is my home for the next six months.

Aside from the few times that my tico brother has had to repeat his sentence upwards of five times while I stare at him like I don’t know any Spanish, I feel that I have been progressing well with fitting in to my host family. Surprisingly, I seem to get along the best with my papa tico, who I think gets a bit of a kick out of my stumbling over verb conjugations and is the most likely to ask me a question without giving up before hearing the answer. He is also one of the easiest for me to understand, because he has a habit of half-yelling most of his sentences (this habit I very much appreciate).

I have also heard that the one week mark is the first learning curve for a foreign language; the second comes after two weeks, and then improvement becomes a little more sparse. As for personal experience: I can’t say that my Spanish has gotten any worse, but honestly, I don’t think I have much to compare it with. Back in the states, I hardly ever actually practiced my Spanish with another living person (which in retrospect, might have been a good idea), so all I can really say that spitting out a five word sentence is better than the nodding and smiling that I was previously used to.

I suppose just the fact that I am now willing to stop and chat a little with the neighbor down the street is more than I ever could have expected from myself at home, so we’ll go ahead and say that the trip so far is looking up.