Bridge Year Costa Rica – Fall 2025

The rain pours down a few feet in front of me, dampening the sounds nearby. My fellow Bridge Year-mate Lena is talking to someone on the phone only ten feet away, and I can only make out a few muffled words: “Oh yeah! Right, and…” and so on. The rush of water droplets is loud, loud, loud, putting me in a bubble where I can only clearly make out my own movements—no one else’s. It’s as if I’m in a haze that blurs everything around me.

It’s not only this moment that I’ve been in such a haze of confusion, though. That’s happened every day since I arrived in Costa Rica. I learned German, not Spanish, in high school, and my two-ish months of learning Spanish online using an amalgamation of Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, and StudySpanish.com didn’t make me fluent. Every day, there’s something I don’t understand—conversations swirl about me, and while others laugh and chime in with their own thoughts, I just laugh when other people do and answer “si” when asked a question.

I remember a conversation I had with some of my fellow Bridge Year companions as we walked through the city one evening after Spanish class. We were chatting about how difficult it was to stay focused, how draining it was to have to pay full attention to every conversation all the time—because otherwise, we wouldn’t understand anything. We can’t multitask; we can’t write in Spanish for work and know what our coworkers are talking about at the same time; we can’t read a book and know what our families are saying around us simultaneously. And that’s one thing that strikes me as something I’ll find odd when we go back—that this necessity to always be “on” won’t exist anymore, and everything will be… for the lack of a better word, “easy.”

I think I’ve accepted the idea that I’m not going to understand everything (and that I don’t need to). Before we left for Costa Rica, we talked about what we would gain while we were here—independence, language skills, and friendships were mentioned—but I didn’t think too hard about what I’d lose. Yet I’m now comfortable with the knowledge that I often don’t know what’s going on, that I’m not able to express myself in such a precise and exacting manner as I was able to only a few months ago. Instead of having a variety of brushes and colors at my fingertips, I’m painting monotone paintings with a single brush—and I’ve gotten used to it, which is somehow both exciting (my brain has adapted so quickly!) and sad (for what I’ve lost).

I was calling my family a couple days ago, and a math problem came up that, had it been a month earlier, I would have fully dissected to try to understand. Rather, though, I just nodded and let the conversation keep flowing. Is that not odd? Alarm bells should be ringing, but they’re not. My sense of curiosity and my drive to understand the world around me are some of the qualities about myself that I treasure most—is Bridge Year changing that part of me? Who will I be when this year is over?

I talked to my dad about my newfound comfortability with confusion, and he said something I liked. “That’s the norm for immigrants, Mayo.” Immigrants live in places that can be completely different from where they grew up, in lands with a foreign language, foreign culture, and foreign traditions. I think about what my mom did when she immigrated from Japan, what my grandparents did when they immigrated from Taiwan, and I have no clue how they did it. This year is only a passing glance at what it feels like to adjust to a new culture, to nod along to words you don’t understand, try to carve a space for yourself, and create ties with people fully out of your comfort zone, and it gives us a newfound respect for our relatives, ancestors, and community members that have done the same thing.

We spend a brief time in the haze, but it changes us forever—changes that we must learn to accept, for it is important to become aware of the world around us.