We arrived at the TEFL classroom, which was on the second floor of “La Mini Plaza” next to a dentist’s office and a café. Here we met all of the TEFL students (9 total, including ourselves)……..
Racheal and Chris – young newlyweds from Canada who left their jobs (Chris was a stockbroker and Racheal was a piano teacher), bought a dog and moved here indefinitely after enjoying a vacation here last year. They want to get their TEFL certificates and teach in Samara. Their last vacation was in Thailand where they attended a “half moon party” (a rave where everyone is painted in glow paint and they dance the night away in a crescent shaped field) and rode elephants.
Georgie – a 50 something married woman and teacher from Michigan. We met her husband Keith the night before while watching the Superbowl. He has come to Costa Rica to be a beach bum while she takes TEFL, something she has wanted to do for 12 years. They lived in Kenya together for a decade where he got involved with disaster relief and eventually got a job with the US government heading up international disaster relief programs.
Gennevive – A French Canadian who exclaimed during our first icebreaker that she likes German boys. Her mother has worked in Samara since Genny was 16 so she has been in and out of Costa Rica since then. After falling in love with an Italian she moved to Italy for a while and then found herself in New York. She speaks French, Spanish, English and Italian. She wants to be able to teach English to master it herself and have it on her resume for some job that we can’t remember. Her last vacation was a 72-hour non-stop dance cruise out of Miami.
Diana and Sara – the South African mother and daughter we befriended in the cab. They came to Samara from Tiajuana, Mexico. Sara has so many traveling stories and wants to get her certification to continue to see the world but is a little torn about her journey as she has left her English boyfriend behind in Cape Town. Her major was International Relations and she will get her masters after tending to her travel bug. Diana speaks many languages and wants to take the course and then go back to Tiajuana and then return to Cape Town.
Emma – our red-headed, yoga-loving, ceramicist, adventurous neighbor who came to Costa Rica by herself from Ashville to get used to traveling. She wants to get certified and spend 2 years traveling and teaching in Central America before getting her masters in Psychology. Originally from the Boston area she may return home to teach art for a few months to make some cash to fund her next adventure.
Us – 2 recent University of Tennessee graduates with a yearning for adventure and a lengthy list of destinations that we would like to explore. We have no desire to be teachers but thought that TEFL would give us some structure in our traveling and be a way to easily get jobs in Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand etc. as we hopped from place to place for a while.
We were in the class for all of 4 hours before leaving for our lunch break, ridden with doubts about our choice to spend 9 hours a day learning to be teachers followed by hours of homework and lesson planning for the classes we would begin teaching the following day. We had learned that most teaching contracts were a year and the Costa Rica TEFL school primarily had connections with schools in South Korea and Central America. The program was amazing and interesting and the teachers (Dana from the US & Julia from the UK) were so passionate about what they did. We had befriended our classmates and engaged in the material all morning but we had some serious doubts about if this wonderful program fit with our big picture goals…..
Our main goal was to travel, not become certified English teachers. We both want to get jobs in our fields upon returning to the US, not be English teachers. We wanted to spend our time in Costa Rica learning to communicate in Spanish, not learning to be English teachers. We were willing to spend some of our savings to embark on our adventure of going place to place until we felt ready to go home, not be obligated to stay in 1 place for 6 months or a year to be English teachers……so we asked ourselves a very obvious question: why were we spending a month and a decent sum of money to get certified to be English teachers?
We were sitting on the beach during this bit of soul-searching and we noticed the beautiful Intercultura School right behind us. The grassy campus of Intercultura was full of hammocks with a coffee bar and students from all around the world and at all different levels intently attempting to converse in Spanish. We walked inside to inquire and found that TEFL had brought us to Samara for a reason, and that reason was Intercultura. Here we would pay weekly to learn Spanish in intense 4-hour a day immersion programs. We would be able to spend our time studying lying directly on the beach using the wireless internet (a rare commodity here) and engaging with students from all over the world. A weekly examination (on Monday mornings) places you in your Spanish level for the next week. You must pass the next evaluation to move up a level for the next week, or your repeat your level. Classes alternate morning and afternoon. With our payment for Spanish classes we got access to the campus on the beach anytime, yoga classes, Latin dance classes, cooking classes, field trips, aerobics classes, eco-hikes, and invitatons to the weekly celebrations for Intercultura graduates. We also get a kitchen and lounge at school, language labs, student advisors, a cultural orientation, and tour planning resources. This was the place for us!
Without a shred of doubt left we returned to TEFL from our lunch break and told the director our concerns, and about our visit to Intercultura. She was supportive and gave us our TEFL enrollment money back! The ease of this decision and the support of the TEFL staff made it seem as if it were meant to be.
We left TEFL classes early, used the internet to skype people for a while, and then went to a very long dinner and walk on the beach. We met Emma back at our apartment and she told us about her day and lesson planning for class tomorrow. She 100% agreed that Intercultura is a better fit for us.
Sooo now we have a whole week in Costa Rica until we can take our Intercultura entry test next Monday! We hope to zip-line, ride horses, rent bikes (more to come on this one), take a surf lesson and settle in to our new home!
We live here! :)
Excited for our adventures....
Trying our first Costa Rican beers- Imperial
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