Blog

When I got back from Monteverde, I had exactly six days to have as many reunions and goodbyes as I could. First, a game night with the crew of “Apertura.” I left with zero pictures but we laughed so hard we almost cried and I was reminded of all this crew meant to me, allowing… Read more

I was up late the night before this last big trip. My emotions were running high from seeing many of my classmates for the last time and screening our films we worked so hard on all semester. After getting home, submitting my last assignment of the semester, and packing up my backpack for the next… Read more

We headed to Jacó just two hours from San José for a waterfall tour on Saturday. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the tour, but it turned out to be an amazing trip out of my comfort zone. We started out walking into the rainforest, where our guide stopped to point out some… Read more

Remember how the Social Sciences building was occupied by student protests for two weeks? When we came back for our first classes, the building looked a little different. Part of the agreement the protesters made was to leave up the messages they had decorated the school with, excluding anything explicitly offensive, which will be removed.… Read more

“Rodaje” is one of my favorite new words I’ve learned, and I’ve been using it a lot lately. It means shooting/filming, which is exactly what my crew and I have been doing the past few weeks. We did our principal filming last Sunday and Monday night, from 6pm to 7am. Yes that’s right, a 13… Read more

school and routine A lot of this month has involved preparing to shoot our short film, Apertura. We worked on green screen (my first time) and filmed a practice version of our opening scene to see if the visual effects we’re planning on using needed any extra work. In my sculpture class my vase is… Read more

I planned this trip less than a week before we left. I decided I wanted to do a school project over the impact of tourism in Manzanillo, a small town on the Caribbean coast I had visited with my mom in July. Luckily, one of my Grupo de Kansas friends wanted to tag along. I… Read more

Monkeys!!! That’s how I would sum up this trip in a word. I won’t make you scroll, here they are! We started this trip with yet another bus ride. This one was a quick 4 hours, and we arrived around 2pm. This gave us time to walk the many steps up to our Airbnb and… Read more

First, a few highlights from this week of school. On Wednesday I had a very long sculpture class spent preparing our clay to be shaped. We all lined up with our wooden trays and waited to receive huge globs of wet clay, the beginnings of our final projects. To get the clay dry enough to… Read more

This week I literally had my head in the clouds. On Thursday I decided somewhat spontaneously to join some of the other international students on a trip to the Irazú volcano. But before I get to that, let me take you through the highlights of the rest of the week. This week I explored taking… Read more

Since I only have class during the morning, I try to fill up my afternoons with something other than homework, especially on Fridays. This Friday I met up with the Grupo de Kansas girls for lunch at a cafe called Ohana that specializes in egg waffles, milkshakes, and acai bowls. I was missing Kansas Barbecue… Read more

Two weeks ago I went to my first class at the University of Costa Rica (UCR). Now that I’ve started to get into something of a routine, here’s the rundown on what a week of school looks like for me so far. Monday My first class of the week is Realización de Cortometraje (Short Film… Read more

This week hasn’t all been beaches and tropical vistas. During the last four weeks we’ve been completing a 3-credit-hour orientation class made up of three sections: Writing, Costa Rican Culture and History. Through these classes I have learned a lot in a short amount of time. I now feel like I have a general understanding… Read more

This weekend my mom came to San José and we went to Limón, a province on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica to visit 3 places: Cahuita, Puerto Viejo and Manzanillo. On our way there we took a really fun pit stop, white water rafting in the Pacuare river. The Pacuare river rafting started with… Read more

We went to the beach! Our trip started on Sunday. We took a bus just two hours from San Jose (stopped to see some crocodiles) and ended up on the Pacific Ocean side of Costa Rica in the province of Punta Leona. On the first day we walked down to the beach from our hotel… Read more