The best apps and websites to have during your semester in San Isidro

In All in English, Costa Rica

Hello again!

The semester has come to its end, and I want to share the best apps and websites you should use during your semester here in San Isidro. Of course all normal social media apps applies to communicate with the other students in Kulturstudier, but a lot of other tools is nice to have here.

Unlike in Norway, and north of Europe, the digitalization have not had the same speed in Costa Rica, which means you have to pay with cash on the bus, you need to pay your phone bill at the office and such, but here are some of the sites and apps you can take advantage of.

You can make your everyday life a lot easier with apps, here on our weekly intervalls in the beautifull neighbourhood.

Facebook – This is where the staff have created a group for all students and where they put all information. The information can be about weekend trips, emergency contacts, school deadlines and so on. It is necessary to pay attention to their posts to stay updated!

WhatsApp – although this is not widely used in Norway, this is the app for communication is Costa Rica. This is the best app to connect with locals and the staff, regarding both messages and calls. Some locals prefer Instagram for chatting, but WhatsApp takes you a long way.

Uber – Uber is used a lot in San Isidro, and everyone use it to get around. The busses can take you sometimes, but the Ubers are quite cheap and very reliable.

UberEats – This is the same as Foodora/Wolt, an app where you can order food from several restaurants.

Tricount is very helpfull to keep track of the bills as we share house with a swede and cannot use Vipps. Sometimes the restaurants wish to have one common bill, but then you can split it easily in Tricount.

Tricount – this is an app that can keep track of who owes money to the group. It works in the same way as Vipps/Swish, but you cannot sent money, you can see the balance and keep track so that the one behind can pay the next bill. This is excellent if you are from different countries, you can also add multiple currencies.

TravelSpend – this is recommended by several students so that you can track your spendings and economy as you travel.

Booking.com/AirBnB – for booking stays while taking some weekendtrips.

Google Maps is excellent to use to find the way to nice locations in your surroundings, here on our way to Playa Cocal in Quepos.

Google Maps – this is very reliable and nice to use in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, they don´t have street names like in Europe, so the locations are often sent as coordinates, which you can put directly into google maps. A tip is to add some time to the arrival time that google maps estimates, because there might be traffic and unforeseen causes along the way.

Waze – This is an app for maps in Costa Rica which can give additional information about traffic and other practicalities.

The bus to Dominical is frequently used by the students. With the Waze app you can see the reason to why the bus sometimes are stuck in traffic 🙂

MiClaro – This is a website where you can keep track of your phone bills and the phone usage, if you choose to buy a Claro SIM-card.

DeepL – This is a good app for translating from one language to another. The language model is built on AI, so that it recognize the order of the words better than google translate does.

Quizlet – an app for flashcards to learn new glossary

SpanishDictionary – another app to support your Spanish. Here you can see conjugations in addition to english explications. Additionally, I recommend to add the SpanishDict widget to your phone, this will give you a new word every day to learn at the background of your phone 🙂

These days there are so many good tools to help you on your Spanish journey. The tools I use the most is DeepL, SpanishDictionary and Quizlet.

AulaVirtual – This is where you get your grades and hand in your work to the university.

BankID appen – this appears to the norwegans, but it´s a good tip to fix the BankID app before you travel, because regular BankID will not work if you switch your SIM-card.

An app for your insurance – this is always good to have in hand in case of an emergency.

 

I hope this can help you during your stay in Costa Rica, the apps have been very helpful during my stay.

 

– Ingvild