What To Do After

Four days ago, I returned from five weeks abroad in Costa Rica.  On Sunday, Costa Rica beat Greece to qualify for quarterfinals of the 2014 World Cup.  As the game was playing, I was unpacking, and trying to make myself fruit frescas just as my host family did, wishing I could hear the car horns and people yelling back in San Jose. The city would be in uproar about the game, and I wanted to see that.

Before I went abroad, I didn’t consider how it would feel to come back– I was more tired than anything else.  I was still thinking in Spanish.  When the O’Hare Airport Customs Officials spoke in English, I was taken aback, and then I couldn’t stop laughing; I was relieved, happy, sad, nostalgic for the country I had just came from.  For several months before leaving, “Costa Rica” was what I told people when they asked how I would spend my summer, and it was something I was constantly planning for: I need to get rain boots for Costa Rica.  Will they have the kind of tooth paste I use in Costa Rica? What if I don’t understand the bus system in San Jose? Now that it’s over, it is as if a milestone has passed.

Costa Rica was not my first time out of the country, but it was the first time I traveled alone, as well as lived for a longer period of time outside of the United States.  I don’t know how prepared I was for that.  It was the little things that proved to be challenging– navigating a grocery store or asking for directions to my bus stop. Now that I’m home, I see those aspects of travel everywhere, and I am immensely grateful both to be home and to have had the opportunity to live abroad.  I couldn’t have picked a better country.  When my host family dropped me off at the airport, my mother said “Nos vemos”– we will see each other again.  And I genuinely hope she is right.

Thank you for taking this journey with me! Until we see eachother again,

Dorothy