algunas comparaciones

• The US has pretty strict copyright rules and regulations. Normally, professors will not make photocopies of books, unless classes have just begun and people don't have their books for the first day or two. If you just bought books for this semester and had to pay out the wazoo for books, then brace yourself.
  Here in Costa Rica, the copyright rules are a lot less stringent, and professors can drop a book (or whatever they want copied) off at a photocopy place (they are EVERYWHERE down here!), and they will photocopy the entire textbook and let you buy it that way instead. As long as the professor isn't making any profit off of it, this is fine. So I went today to the photocopy place to pick up my books and additional reading for my classes and guess how much I paid for my textbook for one class....4600 colones, or $8-9 USD. Yes, $8-9 US DOLLARS. Isn't that crazy?!
• I'm not sure if this is the case in the rest of the town, country, etc., but good lighting is hard to come by here. In the classrooms at the University, the lights are not turned on at all during the day. They aren't at home either. They use only the natural light, which is good, unless it's cloudy, which it is most of the time. The light in my room is very dim, but luckily I have a desk lamp that is able to give good bright light for reading things. Hope this doesn't mess with my eyes!
• For many phrases or words in Spanish, there are no direct translations. Sometimes that is hard for me to deal with. I am bad about trying to translate things to English so that I can think about them, instead of reading and understanding them in Spanish. Last summer in Ecuador, I stopped doing that after a while and got used to just thinking in Spanish, which is kind of mind-boggling, but cool at the same time. Hopefully once I have been here a little longer I will be able to just read things and make myself not think in English, but just think in Spanish!