The First of Many Adventures

Rachele is finishing her last day of work at the hospital before we ship off away from Hanover for the year. I've just finished packing up what was our first apartment together, an in-laws apartment above the garage of a retired couple, Fran and Gary, from Norwich. Over the past two weeks they have taken to us, and began making extra servings of their meals, to have enough to include the two of us. Although it has been less than two months, we've already created a number of great memories here, and we both hope that somehow it will still be available when we return to this area next summer.

When Rache gets out from her second straight 12 hour shift today, I'll drive her straight to my parents’ house in Hampton Falls for the night, and then we'll catch our flight from Boston to Miami at 7am. From there it is off to San Jose, Costa Rica for six weeks.We found what seems to be the perfect Spanish language program, called Adventure Education Center. It is an accredited Spanish program through a large Texas University, and has a specific course that is geared towards Medical Spanish. We’ll be taking 4 weeks of classes, which consist of 4 hours of general Spanish in the morning and then 2 hours of medical Spanish in the afternoon. They arrange for us to go into local clinics and hospitals and get to know the medical system there, and help out where we can. The first two weeks we’ll be up in the jungle in a town called Turrialba. Turrialba is an old coffee plantation town that sits beside the Rio Turrialba, renowned for Central America’s best white water rafting. Which brings me to the reason they call this school Adventure Education Center…

The second two weeks we’ll be “studying” in Dominical, a surfer town on the Pacific Coast, just south of Playa Hermosa. There is the option to include surfing lessons into the program. We left an extra week and a half of the end of our stay to see the parts of the country we are unable to cover on the weekends.

So off we go, between my broken Spanish and Rachele’s Spanish-Italian, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of laughs to share. We’ll be sure to keep you posted…