10 May – Monday
The water’s back on! Woo! Clean clothes and a proper shower! Well, I say a proper shower… it’s still a cold water shower though.

When I got into school today, Tomas told me that the place where we were drinking last night thinks I didn’t pay for one of my drinks. Bah, sure, I thought. Look I even have a receipt to prove it. What happened was, normally the muchacho (guy) comes over to take your drinks order where you’re sitting and you pay at the end. But at one point I got sick of waiting and went up to the bar to get another drink and I paid for it there. However after giving him the money for my drink, the guy simply walked off out the back without doing anything. Eventually the muchacho notices me waiting and I told him I’d just paid for a drink and had got nothing, and so he made me one and brought it over. I’m sure that he also added that drink to the bill after I’d already paid for it.

Anyway, I’m not going back there, it’s the furtherest bar from the school, the food is slow, some people don’t like the drinks they get from there and the service is bad. And it’s expensive. However, something I can’t get my head around is something that happens very commonly here – you go up to the bar to pay for a drink, you pay for your drink and then the person behind the bar makes your drink when THEY feel like it – you often don’t get it straight away. I’m not sure if there’s a communication breakdown, I’m doing something wrong or if I’m simply being impatient, but if I go up to the bar to pay for a drink that means I want it now!

I got my haircut for 5,000 colones (£7.50) which my host mum informs me was horrificly expensive and her friend would have done it for 2,000. Hmm, scary, anyway the salon had air-conditioning; if it didn’t have it I would have melted into the chair during the haircut.

11 May – Tuesday
I tried to get a photo taken of my host family today. My host mum wouldn’t let me because she thought she looked ugly. Otro día, she said.

12 May – Wednesday
I caught the bus to Nicoya today after waiting for it for ages. The bus timetables displayed here show you the times for the bus from the start of the route, not for the bus stop you are currently at – helpful huh! So the bus could turn up any time between the time displayed and June, if you’re lucky. Anyway, here’s the full Samara bus timetable to Nicoya:

Quite why I took a photo of the bus times I don’t know. Oh yes, it was because I’m lazy and couldn’t be bothered writing down all the times. And hey, maybe someone will see this blog post who’s stuck in Samara and wants to know when the buses out are! Just to add, there’s also a bus to San Jose from Samara, but there’s only one, and it leaves at 4:30am.

I was trying to find out times for the bus to Liberia where I will catch my flight out from (geez, are we getting close to that time already?) and ran into a bit of trouble communicating with the ticket lady. What I worked out she was saying (I think) was that although I can take her bus, I can get it 1,300 colones (£2) if I go down the street to the other bus stop. She pointed me down the only street leading out of the bus stop and said something that went way over my head, and by some miraculous twist of fate I walked through a rather dodgy residential neighbourhood and arrived at the correct bus station which was tucked in a corner. There I learned that buses go every 20 minutes and you can’t buy a ticket in advance anyway. Oh well, now I know!

Ok so I was able to get two photos taken of my host family today… here they are!

In the first photo, there’s Ramon, me, Norma, and Carolina, and in the second photo there’s Norma, me and Malori, who used to be a student in the school but she still lives in the house while she travels and works.

13 May – Thursday
Our class yesterday was the hardest by far, we were learning the difference between the imperfect tense and the preterite tense, which if you don’t know any spanish is really hard to explain – because there’s not really an english equivalent which is what makes it so hard to learn in the first place.

Tonight I went to Bar Olas because I heard that some students from the school were going there. I got there at 8:30 since people were saying 8:00, and the only people from the school were two guys who I hadn’t talked to before, and didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in talking to me so I left again, luckily I saw people I know about 2 minutes up the beach so that was good. The bar had no fans and there was no breeze so it got uncomfortable real fast, so we went back up the beach to our favourite Tabanuco’s. I had some cocktails including my favourite one that contains ice-cream, but then I realised I’m starting to run out of money quite fast so there won’t be any more cocktails from now on I don’t think.

Oh boy, our exam is tomorrow. It’s not exactly a formal exam and it’s not going to determine the rest of my life but I still like to try and get a good score in the exams.