Bridge Year Costa Rica – Spring 2025

By Ian

I fell in love with the word clairvoyance after discovering it in Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits. Clairvoyance dances your tongue around with its syllables, sounds sophisticated, and has a beautiful definition: the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future.

It’s been over five months since I first stepped foot in Costa Rica. In all that time, I joined and became part of a new family, explored the country’s rich coast and luscious forests, and made lifelong friends at my music school.

Like my dad, who studied for one year in Washington, and my mom, who did the same in Japan, I’ve been having fun learning a new language and continuing a family tradition. Yet, my real motive when I embarked on this journey was to discover what I wanted to do, not just in college but also in life.

That’s a big goal. And, I’m disappointed to say that I still have no clue what direction I want to take, which I’ve kind of expected.

Now would be a great time to have a little bit of clairvoyance, a glimpse into the future to reassure myself. I like to focus on the present and cast aside these worries with a monotonous routine that distracts me.

When the music school was in season, my work schedule would be in the late afternoon. Students couldn’t come during the day as they had school; they always poured in after four p.m. That left me with the entire morning and noon to myself, with the luxury of not having to set an alarm to wake up.

Only three things would get me out of bed. Crying birds looking for a mate, the chain reaction of dogs barking set off by a cat, or when my host mom would come at eight thirty to prepare breakfast. She takes care of a relative next door in the early morning, and we have breakfast right after.

It’s refreshing to see the early sunlight spill and cover the living room while having eggs with pastries and fresh juice. Breakfast will always be my favorite part of the day in Costa Rica, especially when I’m not in a rush to get to work.

Miriam, my host mom, and I usually talk about her sons in San Jose or whatever topic floats up. It’s a good way to practice my listening and speaking skills, but it sometimes gets tedious when I have to mentally decipher what she is saying without a dictionary. As months passed, I noticed that I had to work less hard to understand our conversations, which was a nice encouragement to keep practicing Spanish.

Breakfast is followed by a twenty-minute walk to the gym and then a thirty-minute walk back. The street that connects my house to the rest of the city is a steep incline, taking more time to climb upwards rather than breezing down. Afterwards, I work through a page or two of Harry Potter in Spanish and fill my notebook with new words like trueno and apolillado.

That’s the end of my morning routine. I find comfort in having a set list of tasks that are consistent every day and balances the random activities I might find myself in the afternoon. I’m excited to see how the rest of the months go. Ciao.