Hello from the other side. I have finally arrived and so far one of my favorite thing about Monteverde, Costa Rica is the campus. The campus is in middle of a rain forest and their is tons of trail you can explore when ever you want. Also the amount of animals and bugs are amazing. I’m going through CIEE for my study abroad and how they set up student life is really cool. First of all, the program has only 21 people in it so all the classes are relatively small and we all already know each other really well. The teachers focus hard on the studies and requires adequate studying to keep up. The CIEE staff create event for us to do every week so far we have had a night hike, dance lessons, gone to the beach for the weekend, and we had a soccer game with locals. Soccer is a pretty big thing in Costa Rica. The local people are all really friendly, and most speak at least a little bit of English that helps out a lot. From the campus you can walk like ten minutes and there is a pizza place that’s owned by one of the staff members and also a person that works on the campus here sells ice cream out of his house. As far as culture shock, I don’t think it has hit. The only thing I had to get use to that was different to the US is that their are so many bugs here that you kind of have to accept that you might have to sleep with a few spiders and the other thing is getting hot water is pretty rare because on campus they heat there water from solar panels. It’s an awesome concept but its the rain forest here so their not enough sun to get warm showers everyday. A normal week day routine here is, I wake up at 6:30-7am then get breakfast at 7:30am at the cafeteria and stay there talking to friends until I have Spanish class at 9am. After Spanish ends, it time for lunch. All the meals on campus are mostly served with food grown on campus and all are organic. After lunch, I have about 3 hours before my Plants and People class at 4. During this time, I sometime go on a hike, hang-out with some friends, finish my homework, or just relax in my room. After class ends, I head to dinner. Usually after dinner everyone heads to the rec-room. It is a cool open air building that has a fireplace and a bunch of chairs and hammock s in it. We usually hang out in there and play card games, talk, listen to music and dance. Usually we all head back to are room around 10-11 pm. Then repeat the same thing the next day.