Day 3: Sobrevivimos Español

Nay N.
May 10, 2023
2 min read

Updated: May 11, 2023

Buenos dias! To start our third day of adventures in Costa Rica, our Mamatica gave us an amazing breakfast of beans, rice, eggs, and fresca de melon. Afterwards, we made some small talk with their pet parrot Lorito (hiding behind me) before we headed out to our first class of the summer!

During our first full day, the Papatico showed us around the area and the path that he would take to get to Universidad Latina (Sede Heredia). This time though, our homestay group was able to confidently walk ourselves to the school for our class. The way to class was beautiful, we passed by the nearby park and outdoor gym, and even saw the nearby train speed on by since our homestay is near the train tracks!

For today's class we had our crash course on learning "Survival Spanish" where we learned some common Spanish terms for us to use so that we can navigate ourselves around the area. To practice, our profesora gave us assignments to fill out during the lecture and gave us lessons on what certain phrases that we would likely use meant, and how we structure our sentences in the language using conjugations. I needed a bit of help from my classmates and teacher, but by the end of the lesson I felt pretty confident in my ability to interpret some Spanish phrases. However, I do definitely need some more time in being able to speaking Spanish correctly, so I plan on continuing to practice with the notes and assignments given to us from the course. She also gave us a brief summary on how certain phrases or words may be exclusive to Costa Rica, the way that the currency system works, and some of the history behind the country.

the history behind the country.

After our lecture, many of my peers and I headed over to the nearby mall. Where we explored around and found several fun stores and new food stands. Raphael, Jeshua, and I roamed the place together and found a couple skateboard shops in the mall to scout out. My favorite location that I’ve found so far here was the huge toy store with many limited/exclusive edition figurines! The group later grabbed some food and sat down at the food court, where we spent some time chatting with one another and working on our class assignments as a team.