13 (or habits and home).

Matt said it takes 21 days for something to become a habit.
I was really close with the cold shower everyday habit.
and then last night IT WAS WARM.
back to square one with that one.

Other habits come easily. I'm used to the all toilet paper in the trash can thing. I'm used to rice and beans for every meal thing. I'm used to hike up the mountain to the Institute everyday thing.

I started classes at El Instituto Monteverde two weeks ago. With me are 22 other students; 12 from Goucher and 10 from Mt. Holyoke in Massachusetts. I'm taking four classes (Environmental Sustainability, Intermediate Spanish, Field Methods in Community Health, and Development and Social Change in Costa Rica), and every Friday we have a field trip, whether to the Cloud Forest Reserve or the café farms or SOMEWHERE. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but not much to distract me besides the weather.

It's in the 20s here (CELSIUS, of course), early summer, with lots of sun and sometimes we're in these mist rains, which means we're in clouds, followed by rainbows. There are more stars than I think I've ever seen. We've got some sloths, too, and miraculous birds. The town itself, well, there are three towns connected by one main road. At the bottom is Santa Elena, the downtown. They've got the supercompro, farmacia, bar amigos, and where most of my classmates live. Walk up a steep hill and you hit Cerro Plano, where I live, and where most of the hotels are. on my way to the institute this morning i counted between 15-20 hotels in a 2 km walk. the divide between cerro plano and monteverde occurs when the road moves from paved road to dirt road. Monteverde was founded by expatriot Quakers in the 1950s and is still this ex-pat oasis of sorts.

Within this rural community there are stratifications and tensions, obscuring the definitions of ecotourism, sustainability, etc. etc. etc. Yes, it is beautiful, but this is a real area with real issues and strong undercurrents of change (but why these particular changes and what are the definitions and implications of these changes?). I will spend my semester discovering some answers to these questions.

In the meantime, things are constant. I have a great home and a great host family. They are pretty much the best family for me. From the first day we clicked and it's all very natural and I'm very much already a member of the house, not a "renter" or "student," although in third person am referred to either as "la estudiante" or "muchacha," but also in closer quarters just "mi hija." No English. I eat dinner with the family and do dishes and the other day slept in the same bed as my host mom (I'll get to that story in a minute) and while most of that doesn't sound totally odd and out of place, several of my peers do not have the same sort of familiar relationship with their families, at least not yet.

So, who are they? my mom is Maribel. She's in her late 40s abut doesn't look it, and works at the panadería in Santa Elena. She's not a huge fan of meat and is lactose intolerant, so that eases my nutritional obsession. one of the other major factors i noticed was how i know where the majority of foods in my house come from, as in, it's all real food. apparently this is a sign of class, although opposite to that in the United States. many families who work in the ecotourist industry (at least the families, again, my peers live with), eat a majority of processed foods, from the United States. With the influx of "ecotourism" in this rural town in conjunction with CAFTA, food in the world of commodity as well as nutrition is, at least to us and some of the researchers here at the institute, becoming a relatively large area of study. but back to my family. Maribel is a wonderful woman who loves taking care of me and spending time with me. It's another woman in the house. Her fifteen year-old son, Ariel, is a good-hearted teen. I've roughhoused with him on a few occasions and have been able on a few occasions to match him in strength. He's playful, for sure, but also respectful and responsible and truly good-hearted and loves his mom. our house is also the lavacar freddie(which is, believe it or not, all hand-done), which he works on Saturdays, which is the only day it's really open.

and then there's eighteen year-old Emile, who's still very much an enigma to me. He's Ariel's best friend, and in many ways Maribel's second son. He lives upstairs and eats practically every meal with us, watches tv with us, is always around except for showering and for sleeping. He walks an hour everyday to work in La Cruz. I know nothing about his parents. I've very much taken a liking to him, and to this whole family dynamic in truth, so it's good. There's always energy in the house, which is quite small, but I have my space.

They built me a new room this weekend. For my first week I lived in Ariel's room (while he either slept in Emile's or his mom's room). And then on Sunday, a man came and started building a room, splitting the master bedroom in half. None of us really prepared for this building, and it was too late before I realized that a doorway needed to be drilled out of the concrete wall of what was then my room.

Everything in the house was covered in a thick, concrete dust.

So I didn't have a room for a night and slept in Maribel's bed with her, which was an idea she seemed to prefer over me sleeping on the couch.

Although I still don't have a door, I like my new room.

I also like how simple my life is. I'm back in grade school, except with a little more mental stimulation. I wake up at 6 everyday, get ready for school, eat breakfast, leave around 7 for the Institute with my ready-made lunch, spend the day at the Institute, get home by 6, shower, eat dinner, do homework, read, maybe watch a little tele with the family, and go to sleep between 9 and 10. no extracurricular to-dos, no distractions, bare bones life that I haven't had in, well, a decade. I'm hoping we can organize weekend activities that do not include going to the bars, with which I'm still not super comfortable, although as I settle in more I will probably become more at ease with the idea. I remember talking to a former roommate's mom before I left the States and she said "if my daughter has told me anything about you it's that this semester will be a much needed, much deserved break from your normal habits." Which is a compliment, I suppose, and certainly one that YES, I NEED. I needed this.

The only question, then, is how it will be when I return.
But that's not a question I have any interest in tackling anytime soon.

I kind of sort of broke my computer so I'll have a big photo post next week!