Friday, February 14, 2014

Today was Valentine’s Day, so I played the part of a Valentine’s Day fairy with bags of chocolate.  This scored big points with my host mom (who is apparently already trying to marry me off…) and hopefully brought a smile to some young ladies who are far away from home during the holiday.  At school we had the students work on a pre-assessment to see what they know about the different subjects to figure out what we can skip since it is an abbreviated class.  I spent most of the morning going through each of the answers trying to depict trends about the students’ knowledge.  After school, I grabbed some lunch at a local ‘soda’ and waited for Zoe to get back to the house.  From there, we packed up our stuff and headed to the bus stop to get to San Jose.  In San Jose, we caught up with Zoe’s friend Taylor and headed off for Puntarenas.  The bus ride was approximately two hours long and by the time we got there, we knew that we would not have much luck crossing the Gulf of Nicoya at night so we grabbed some dinner on the beach.  We tried to find our hostel, but the guy we asked sent us towards a hotel with a similar name, but in the complete opposite direction.  Luckily, there was a festival going on in Puntarenas so we got to take in things like the bumper cars and all kinds of loud music.  There was tent called “Go & Fun.”  I’m not sure if they knew that made zero sense.  There was a plethora of police in Puntarenas, so we were able to have them point us in the right direction eventually.  Unfortunately, our room at the hostel did not have air-conditioning.  And the Pacific side is significantly hotter than San Jose.  So we sweated off a few pounds during the night.