With my trip to Costa Rica only a week away, I am excited to experience a new culture and improve my Spanish capabilities. I do not feel nervous or anxious right now, although I suspect I will while traveling. Still, I am sure any nerves will disappear once I am settled in with my host family. This study abroad will be my first time in a non-English-speaking environment. I look forward to the revelation of my Spanish capabilities that conversations with native speakers in Costa Rica will bring.
I also look forward to the cultural immersion I will experience. I love to cook, so hopefully, I can acquire new expertise in the kitchen and learn many new dishes to recreate at home or in the Old College kitchen. The abundance of fresh fruit in Costa Rica is a great privilege, and I hope to try those fruits not readily available at home. The role of Catholicism in Costa Rican culture interests me as well, as I would like to see how it compares to the role of Catholicism and religion as a whole in the United States’s culture. When prudent, I will ask my host family about this and any other curiosities I may develop surrounding Costa Rican culture. I am interested to see how Costa Ricans practice Catholicism. By (hopefully) attending Mass daily, I will gain insight into religious practice in the country and experience it firsthand. I have heard stereotypes about Catholic culture in Latin America as rather old-school and hierarchical, so I am genuinely curious to see how Costa Rica compares.
Having lived in the suburbs in Upstate New York most of my life, the radical change of scenery and environment that awaits me is a bit daunting, although not necessarily foreign. I made a similarly radical (not when it comes to climate, but in almost all other aspects) transition when moving into Old College and starting my freshman year at Notre Dame, so I will apply many of the lessons I learned this year to my time in Costa Rica. I believe the results and output from this trip depend on how much effort I put into embracing the Costa Rican culture and engaging with the local community, my host family, and my peers. With this in mind, I plan to enter with flexibility and openness to discomfort, adversity, change, and anything unexpected that comes my way. Such experiences are often the most formative and the best to learn from, so I will not flee from them and likely cherish them after the fact.