Today we had our orientation seminar in the morning. It lasted a couple of hours but we managed to make it fun and engaging and we all had a great time! After the seminar, some of us went on a little tour of the very small town of Aquiares – we got to see a little bit more of this cozy town, surrounded by coffee, and old buildings, and nature.

In the afternoon, we hopped on the bus to go visit downtown Turrialba. We stopped at central park, a unique park considering the fact it was a soccer field and there are chickens living in there (some random person brought a couple and now there are 5 chickens and they sleep on the trees and random people feed them).

Also we visited the central market, a place where we can find very random stuff, like natural medicines, small restaurants with local food, hats, piñatas, all type of containers, coffee, shoes or even electronic devices like cell phones and rokus.

Then, we went to see the old train station, where the city of Turrialba started to grow around. Turrialba was founded in 1903 but it has been occupied since 12000 years B.C. In Turrialba, there’s a very active volcano, an archeological site, a world-famous postgrad school called CATIE, and it is also where Rawlings International has been operating since the ’80s.

We crossed the 2 bridges which connect the east of Turrialba with the main area, the Black bridge, which was used for the train, and the white bridge, used by other vehicles and pedestrians. After this, we stopped at the Monpik ice cream, which is operating since the 80,s at the vey same corner. Some of the students had the chance to try some very good ice creams and smoothies.

We then returned to our base house where we had some more downtime, ate burgers for dinner, and had a fun reflection and nightly meeting.