School and Salsa!

June 9 Thurs

At this point you know the drill so I’ll start summarizing the repetitive stuff.

Discussion topics in Spanish today were drunk driving and universal health care. We ended up tying healthcare to nutrition, nutrition education, and access to healthy food options and that led to a spirited debate about health versus wealth.

Today’s lecture was on ventilators. Both common and on the more complicated side. Should be interesting if I get to work on one. It's a good mix of mechanical- actual ventilation line and air pumps- and electrical- circuitry, control modes, pressure and volume regulation.

We finished building our power supply but for some reason we couldn’t test it. There was a good bit of frustration as we couldn’t find any problems with our circuit and neither could our staff. The lab became an irritating case of “it worked a second ago” and wishing it would either work completely or stop completely. After an additional 1.5hours of trouble shooting we called it a day. We met the rest of our house at Giacomin. I ordered a Coconada and carchofo J. Not exactly a mom-approved dinner but we were happy. But why not just go home for dinner? Because it was our first dance class! Everyone showed up to the nearby Italian restaurant’s banquet space to learn meringue, swing and off course salsa. With everyone in the right frame of mind, it was a lot fun. We learned the basic steps and a few steps for each style while constantly switching partners and receiving some coaching. I identified a few favorite partners… but everyone did well and enjoyed themselves. At the end, we were treated to a demonstration by our teacher and her husband. As a group, we have a little work to do.

Salsa Dancing= Awesome but doing homework right after when you’re exhausted and tired- not so much. We actually learned merengue, swing- Costa Rican style, and salsa. The boys were comical, and everyone enjoyed themselves.

June 10 Fri

Today we had our first hospital visit. Arielle and I went to San Ramon. It’s one of the larger non specialized hospitals in the country. It has 102 beds and treats thousands of out patients per day. It also has the only milk bank in the country. Touring the hospital with the biomedical staff, who are all really cool, gave us a chance to practice our Spanish while the technicians who knew English practiced with us. We visited the mariposeria, took apart, inspected and repaired medical equipment. Unfortunately for us, repairing for hours doesn’t work when the staff is really on top of things and there’s very little lying around broken. They were really eager to help us learn how the equipment they had set aside worked and to hear our assessments of what was wrong. We got back to school around 4 and headed home. After homework and dinner, our house went out to Longhorns for Emily and Roberts last night. As usual, we enjoyed ourselves.

June 11

Monteverde!

Up at 4:50 to make the 5:30 bus. Our outing to celebrate with Emily and Rob before there departure greatly complicated this whole getting up process but alas we made it! After $1 breakfast of tortilla and eggs was a delicious breakfast. Chivalrous boys stood in pairs monitoring the bus terminal and watching out for us girls- very nice gentleman, tan caballeroso. 4 hour ride to Monteverde. We almost fell of the mountain. Luckily prayers went up and the bus didn’t go down. Lunch. Casado de cerdo. We hung out then bus to the Reserve. 2 hours of hiking and picture taking before busing back to the hotel for hanging out, movie watching, card games, post card writing (there was quite a bit of this) and general group bonding. I struggled to stay up until 9:30