Yoga y chocolate

Highlights of the school week (4/5-4/6)


Monday:

I finally enrolled in the yoga studio! This was very exciting for me, as I figured I was finally forcing myself to regularly exercise, get out of the house and learn something I like. I was also excited to put to good use my organic yoga mat :)

The entire day was like walking through mud, I was so completely exhausted. At this point, there is nothing else I can do about my crummy sleeping situation. It’s loud outside, ALL the time, and therefore I know I’m not getting restful sleep. I started taking melatonin to get deeper sleep, going to bed earlier and drinking coffee, but I was counting on yoga more than anything else to both tire me out and clear my mind, both of which will help.

Anyways, I went to choir, and my chronically late professor was half an hour late, as usual, yet got upset about us ‘wasting time’ as a few people were quietly talking as he started warm-ups…yup. If he were on time, I might get home before 9:30 every choir night *sigh*. So, I left early that night, because I was falling asleep singing (a new sensation for me) and because buses only come every hour. I wanted to catch the 8:10 bus instead of waiting for choir to finish at 8:30ish and then waiting until 9:10 for the last bus of the night. While waiting, I ran into a friend I made on the bus earlier and perked right up. Sometimes all it takes to make my day is some socialization…Mondays are my hard days for being social, as I’m still having problems making choir friends (in both my choir class and in choir). At this point I have multiple friends in all my classes (well, not one, but I will soon as we will be going on a fieldtrip together at the end of the month), so I am resigning myself to not really making friends in choir. I don’t feel badly about this, though, because I’ve never really been able to make choir friends, even in English, and because we still say ‘hi’ and are friendly.

Tuesday:

I made new friends in my dance class, and went to get a smoothie even though I wasn’t hungry just to spend some time with them. Two things about that are nice: 1.) we didn’t go to a bar, which is what people often do between classes to get a beer and watch soccer, and 2.) the smoothies here are awesome because they have fun, tropical fruit. We talked about how both clothing and chocolate are more expensive in Costa Rica, and being a chocoholic and not a shopaholic, I lamented about the chocolate. I mentioned that I didn’t mind chocolate being expensive so much as not being able to find good chocolate, and I was told that Hershey’s is good chocolate. 0_0;;  >.>;;  x_x;;

I’ll admit, I’m a chocolate snob, but Hershey’s will never be ‘good chocolate’ in my book. It’s chocolate to make s’mores, and eat at Halloween, and eat when you’re just bored and don’t really care. The more I ask around, the more I find out that no one likes dark chocolate. I also realize that all things ‘chocolate’ are actually just ‘sabor a chocolate’, meaning the chocolate covered raisins and the cookies with the chocolate on top are really just colored milk fat with chocolate flavor…That was a sad day for me. I’m taking consolation in the fact that Costa Rica has Rittersport dark chocolate, and that I can buy Ghirardelli’s (for a price, of course) if I run out.

Tuesday was also the day of the professor mishap. It turns out, students often call and/or text their professors. Why is this important? Apparently they just change classrooms and times without telling their students, and the only way to find out when and where class is being held is calling them. This is exactly what happened with my Organic Agriculture teacher, and I have been told this is not a first. And how did I find this out? I was extremely lucky to have made a friend in the class, and he came and found me and told me that, because no one showed up to class (duh? He was there, and so were two other students, but it’s a mystery to me how they knew) the professor had cancelled it. Thank goodness he and I were in contact about the group project, and we said ‘see you in class tomorrow’, because that prompted him to come find me. What is even stranger to me is that I passed the professor in the hallway on the way to his class, and he didn’t say anything, and stranger still is that none of the other students showed up to the then-nonexistant old time and place for the class. Just me.

What really got me is that I still needed the professor’s signature to enroll, and I had decided to ask him just before or after class. So, I waited for him to pass by again, as I was in the direct pathway of both his office and the agronomy building, but he never did. Somehow, he got past me and the other student as we watched for him and even tried calling him. I was in absolute shock at the time of how the system worked, and mildly panicked because it was confirmed that he was impossible to locate outside of his office hours, which ended right when class was supposed to start. Just before my final class of the day started, I went to track him down, went from building to building and kept barely missing him, and finally ran into him on the way out. Good thing, too, because he doesn’t read e-mails from unknown people (aka: me), and won’t be on campus for the entire week next week. That means that out of five weeks of class, we will only have had one lecture. During the sixth week we are supposed to have a test, which I assume isn’t happening at this point. We have also missed one of our four fieldtrips due to a university bus being unavailable.

The long and short of it: I have no idea how people get an education here, things make no sense and everyone is ‘pura vida’ so they don’t seem to mind. When I told the program director about my crazy day, she told me that’s why it takes six years to graduate at UCR.

I had my first yoga class Tuesday! Man, it was certainly hard, and I didn’t really take it to heart when bringing a towel was suggested but I really could have used one. Either I was really lazy at previous yoga classes, the climate functions like a sauna, or both. Afterwards, I felt great, and talked with the instructor a little bit. She told me ‘tranquila’ (another favorite phrase here) about not understanding a lot of the instructions and that she had seen me watching others and following along. My wrists and my lower shins/ankles are extremely out of shape, who knew.