New Year is a rather strange holiday for me. Although they signal the start of a new calendar year, for me it doesn’t really signal much else. My own personal New Year has always been around my birthday, mostly because in August my age changes and a new school year begins. But alas, 2010 is [...]

So my body’s been suffering from the most random ailments lately. Before I left Costa Rica I started getting an extraordinary amount of bug bites, something I still can’t pinpoint to this day. They obviously weren’t mosquito bites, since my anti-mosquito wipes didn’t appear to work against them. They itched like crazy, and some even [...]

Ugh. Well, not completely ugh. It’s nice to be able to sleep in my comfy bed again, watch TV whenever I want, and have my entire wardrobe available to me again. But needless to say, I’m already missing Costa Rica dearly. It’s the weirdest feeling. I don’t want to hate being home, but at the [...]

I’m learning that homesickness exists in various forms. It was a concept I never really understood until sophomore year of college, and even then I was only feeling homesick for Chicago area things, such as Jewel Osco and the ABC7 news. My family I missed on occasion, for sure, but I knew I would be [...]

It’s rather surreal: I have been living in Costa Rica for 24 days now. That’s 3 weeks without a cell phone. And essentially TV, since the televisions in my host family’s house are located in rather inconvenient places for me (my parents’ room and my brother’s ‘lair,’ as I like to call it). On the [...]