How Is LMU Similar To Costa Rica?

Luc Brubaker
Costa Rica Final Paper
06/21/13

LMU vs. Costa Rica The rich cultural and the many amazing traits that Costa Rica had in store for us, was only a symbol of the cultural and traits that fall within our team. It seems hard to believe that a country like Costa Rica and a small college soccer team can have so much in common, but along the trip I realized that in a lot of ways, we are the same. Reading the “Ticos” book could only teach each of us so much about Costa Rica and the Ticos that live there because it only mentioned “on the surface” facts that were pretty straight forward; It wasn’t until the trip, when we were able to delve into the culture itself and really understand what the book was saying. Costa Rica didn’t just
For instance, Costa Rica is a very small country, as well as LMU is considered to be a very small college. In the matter of twelve days, it seemed as if we got a taste of everyone in Costa Rica. We went basically everywhere, except for the east coast, while still enjoying each places for a couple days. Twelve days touring the United States won’t even get you to half the states and no tourist will really get a taste for the whole country, like you could in Costa Rica. The only reason why you can’t get from end of Costa Rica to the other in a decent amount of time is because of the roads that they have. If they had roads and freeways similar to the ones we have in the states, it would probably a few hours to get from one side to the other. On the contrary, LMU takes about ten minutes to walk from one end to the whole, where at some colleges you need a car to get to the other side. If you go to a state school, there could be up to 40,000 students, whereas at LMU there are only around 9,000 students. If a Costa Rican came to the United States, I would imagine it being very intimating because of the size. I visited UCSB once and coming from LMU, it was a huge change. Nothing was walking distance and if you didn’t have a bike, then you were able to get anywhere in a reasonable time. That is the opposite of Costa Rica because in a lot of the places we went, there was a lot of things that were walking distance. Many tourists would be able to get away with not renting a car during their stay. LMU is the same way because you also don’t need a car to get around campus or even around the area. I didn’t have a car the whole year and I was fine the whole time because everything that I needed or wanted was walking distance. Costa Rica and LMU both are very small, but that just makes it a lot more convenient for the people who attend that