The university is none like I've ever seen before. To begin with, it's very green here, especially around and in the school. Here is just a view of one part of campus. Look at those mountains in the background! I love being in a valley and being able to see mountains in every direction.
Campus is bigger than I expected. I'm definitely going to have to continue to play tourist and take more pictures! Here is a picture of the inside of the building where we had our orientation- the whole middle part of the building is open, with lots of large plants growing! Most of the buildings on campus are very open from what I've seen so far.
I'm officially signed up for my classes! I have either one or two 3-hour classes a day (except wednesdays!), and three days a week I have class at 8am (new for me). I'm taking two Spanish classes, a Latin American literature class, Comparative Education, and Dance! At the last minute I decided to be brave and ignore my serious lack of rhythm and sign up for the dance class. It should be fun- maybe it'll help me improve my rhythmic issues! On Wednesdays we have an opportunity to play soccer as a group- I'm very excited that I'll have the opportunity to play sports. There also should be a chance to play volleyball, so I'm definitely going to take advantage of that!
Today I met up with some compañeros (friends/peers) from my program as well as a few Ticos (Costa Ricans) and we watched the Ravens beat the Texans! After the game we walked around Heredia a little bit. We saw the Central Park, which was filled with people just hanging out. In everything I read about Heredia, the image of the Fortin de Heredia always comes up, and we got to see that too! It's apparently pretty symbolic of Heredia.
After that, I had the opportunity to go into the mountains north of Heredia to watch the sunset. It was absolutely beautiful. The drive up was beautiful as well, very lush and green. Although it was a little cloudy, from the top we could still see a lot of the valley and all the towns below. Apparently sometimes you can see the planes coming into the airport, which sounds awesome. Also, from a lookout point a little to the west of where I was, apparently you can see the beach and Pacific ocean! I definitely want to go up to the mountains again soon.
Also on our way to the mountains, we drove through San Rafael, a neighboring town. The highlight of the drive was this AMAZING church- Iglesia de San Rafael. Absolutely beautiful. A Tico informed me that this church is completely Italian-made. Apparently when it was being built, they had to take the parts of the church piece by piece from the coast to San Rafael... by carriage. And I think that the carriages now are some sort of symbol for San Rafael, representing the process of building that church- a process that took many years to complete. Although these are not my pictures, I still wanted to show the impressive nature of the church. It absolutely towers over everything around.
When I got home this evening, I had a nice surprise on my wall... Scary!
One final picture- this shot that I took this morning made me realize I was living in the right house...
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