Almost a month in...

Hi friends and family! I have been busy, busy with school so I haven't been able to write, but here are a couple quick highlights.

Dance classes
Both of these have so far been the bomb! This past Wednesday, Corrylee and I had Baile Popular and learned some Swing Criollo (a bouncy swing with a Latin twist, I guess) and Bolero Clásico (which was a slower, classic step). We've just been doing basics so far, so we're hoping we learn some trickier moves. On Thursday, I had my second class of Costa Rican Dance, which is folk dance. We actually danced this time as opposed to last week where we just talked about folklore. It was so much fun! The girls who had the long typical skirts wore those and everyone else (including me) just held scarves in each hand twirled them around. Most of the class are dance majors, so we gringas had to make a big effort to keep up with the professor who taught at a really fast pace - which also made it more exciting. After we learned a whole dance, he split us into four groups and gave us each an hour to choreograph our own dance using the moves we just learned. Not to brag or anything, but my group rocked it!

Flu : (
I caught some kind of virus last Wednesday so I was really tired, had a stuffy nose and soar throat and couldn't sleep very well for a week, but now I'm better! Thank you Lord!

Smoothies
My friends and I have discovered a couple cheap smoothie stands right by our campus. One of them gives you a pure fruit smoothie with cherry-flavored sugar on the rim of the cup and a little paper cup of popcorn for two dollars! I've gotten two so far. My favorite of the two was...I already forget what was in it except that it had ginger and bananas and was delicious!

Protest
On Wednesday, Corrylee and I walked to Spanish class. We had heard some talk about there being some "march" that day, and thus that we might not have classes that day, but since ISEP, our study abroad program, doesn't allow us to participate in protests, we went to school anyways, just in case we did have class. So when we got to the entrance of campus, there was a huge crowd of students, staff and professors, including our Spanish language and culture professor, Alexa, who told us that she'd talked to Ivelina (the Costa Rican ISEP coordinator) who had told her that it was fine if we participated. So a group of us stood in the middle of the street with her and a huge crowd of students that diverted traffic from the main road onto another street. The students held signs, a small band played music while a "mascarada" (person wearing a big fake head over their head) danced around, and then some students from the school of dance performed a rather raunchy dance in the middle of the crowd of students. Then the whole crowd started to march down the street toward the central park, but Alexa told us that she had just received a call from Ivelina telling her that, actually, ISEP students can observe the protest but not participate in the march. So a few of us watched the crowd roll on out and then went and got smoothies. I still had to go to literature class at one o'clock : ( From what I gathered from talking with various people was that the reason for the protest was that the government is trying to privatize the school, which would mean that a lot of students would lose scholarship money. So the other three public universities in Costa Rica also had protests that day...