Upon arriving to Costa Rica, the culture shock took very little time to kick my most basic expectations to the wayside. Unlike some of my classmates (and luckily my roommate), my Spanish is very poor. Despite this, coming into the trip I expected to be able to at least be able to hold a decent conversation with my host mother and her family members. However, I learned within a few short minutes that my host mother planned to speak as little English with us as possible, leaving me completely lost in most of the initial conversations. Luckily, I soon found out that another expectation could be thrown away. Though I didn’t plan to be antisocial with my host family, I did not expect my roommate and I to have early as many conversations with them as we have had to this point. Since our host mother seems to love hanging out and talking with us, she has begun to teach me some words. Between her help and my limited knowledge of the language, I have noticed that I can understand exponentially more today compared to last night when I first met them.

Outside of my language and social expectations, I only had a few expectations with even less of them turning out to be inaccurate. One of these was how quick we made it through customs last night. As a person who has never left the United States and therefore has never gone through customs, I expected the process to take much longer than the twenty to thirty minutes it took us to not only get through customs but get on the bus and leave the airport. Another inaccurate expectation revolved around the open-air market we visited on our walking tour of Heredia. Due to either pictures or movies I have seen in the past, I pictured the open air market as being a bunch of food and clothing stands along a road or on a city block. However, the market we visited today resembled Reading Terminal in Philadelphia: numerous vendors in a large warehouse-esque building who all specialized in different foods or in created different items. Of course there’s nothing wrong with this or really any of my inaccurate expectations, but I was still very surprised. All in all, my experience in Costa Rica to this point has been a positive one, but has not lacked an aspect of learning at nearly every turn.