Anthems of Noll

My friends and I made it to San Juan del Sur, Rivas, Nicaragua by 2pm on Saturday, March 27th 2010. We had left San Jose, Costa Rica the previous night at 11pm and it was supposed to have taken us 6 hours to get here. I think the fact that it's Semana Santa and about half of Costa Rica is populated with Nicaraguans made it so that we came on the busiest weekend of the year. We had to take a taxi from the town the bus dropped us off in- who knows what it was called, they were terrible at communicating what was going on- to San Juan del Sur. It took us 20 scary minutes to arrive as our taxi driver was very nice but slightly crazy. Along the way, we witnessed a dog almost get run over but with the luck of fate slipped right between the wheels of the one car and just had its tail grazed by the next before making it to the other side of the road alive! It was quite a disturbing but relieving sight. The town we finally made it to, however, was well worth the wait. All five of us are stay

I arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica at 7:40pm. Since it was night time, it was hard to tell what was about to be my new home for the next three months looked like. For some odd reason, I didn't get the butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling of arriving in a new place. While I had thought I had made it to my destination in plenty of time, I waited in line to get through customs for the next 45 minutes. I was supposed to meet an ISA representative at the airport by 8pm a the latest so that they could pick me up and take me to Veritas University where my new host family would then bring me to my new home. ISA had said that if anyone showed up after 8pm, they would have to find their own way into town. It looked like that was what I was going to have to do. As I stepped out of the airport's automatic doors, a tall, tanned, dark-featured man asked me where I was going: "¿Adonde va?", to which I responded in broken Spanish that I was looking for an ISA employee: "Busco un emp