The first 15 hours or so in Costa Rica presented a good bit of activities and a phenomenal mother for our homestay. Our homestay mom’s name is Maria and she is extremely kind. One thing that I knew before coming onto this trip is that we were going to be fed a TON of food. One thing that I found a bit unexpected is how involved our homestay mother is with us.
Once we arrived at the house, one of the first things that our homestay mom asked was “Are you hungry?” She then made us each sandwiches and a drink to go along with it. Afterwards, she played a board game with us for about an hour or so when we decided it was time to go to bed. In the morning, she made a lot of food for breakfast. She made patacones and would spread beans and cheese on top of it. The breakfast was delicious and plentiful, I could barely finish everything. Once our host mom Maria knew it was one of the other students’ birthdays, she insisted we invite the whole study abroad group over and bake a cake for everyone. Her involvement really impressed me because coming into this program I thought that we would spend time at the house eating and sleeping, but it is much more than that.
One other thing that I found expected but not to as high of a level as I thought was how nice some of the strangers were. For example, after we went to grab a soccer ball, some of the guys were kicking it around. When it passed one of them, a stranger showed a cool trick and kicked the ball back. It would have been nice enough just to pass it back, but showing us a cool trick was really nice. This not only happened once but twice. While I knew that the people were nice, the way they showed it was a little unexpected (in a good way).