Quick overview of the last few weeks:

For Service Learnin’ week, six other students and I went to live on Playa Buena Vista to learn about turtles, environmental protection at a local level, and playing soccer on the beach with the prettiest ticos we had ever met. Good work, good life lessons, good fun. Very exhausting. 

When we got back there was a lot of work to be done, essay-writing and such, but I came to the stunning realization that I am excited to write about everything! In the last two weeks, I have had four papers/drafts due; 1. how globalization has affected political prisoners, 2. translators (specifically of poetry) responsibility; should they stay true to the literal meaning or the emotional/cultural meaning? 3. neruda’s brilliant approach to mixing the political and personal in his poetry and how we should aim to write/live with a balance of these things, and 4. the link between poverty and environmental crises and possible solutions. Hurrah for interesting essays!

Last week I discovered that “calzone,” the most delicious, juicy, fattening lunch ever for only two dollars at a local pizza parlor, also means “women’s underwear” in Spanish. So when I returned home one day and proudly proclaimed to my mother that I had eaten a “huge, delicious calzone” today for lunch, I was met by a fifteen-minute laughing fit by my host mom and brother. Oh gosh, my life is silly and quite full of adventure.

Off to Panama for two weeks on Monday. It could not be more of a relief.