Student profile: Louise | School of the World, Costa Rica

As the swell rises and the board begins to gain speed underneath you a thousand thoughts flood your mind. They are echoes of the instructions given to you by your teacher. Pop up! Bend your knees, shoulders back! All those commands swish around noisily inside your head and threaten to impair your ability to simply convert those words into action and surf.

One of our former students, Louise Larsson, who hailes from Sweden stayed at the school a handful of times over the last year and a half. Originally, she had decided to come to the school for Spanish immersion classes but instead decided to focus all her energy on surfing. Louise learned to speak the language of the waves. The girl literally would eat breathe and sleep for surf and surf only.

“It’s ironic” Louise told me “I found the school on accident, through a random google search and that accident has changed my life”.

Such is the story I hear many a times from newly hooked surf junkies. Their eyes glaze over as they proclaim their love of surfing, most noting how there is nothing else in the world like the feeling of riding a wave.

Of course, there are factors which influence how quickly you are able to enjoy your surf experience; certainly the environment you are in and instruction you are given play a key part. There are hundreds of surf schools around the world and dozens in Costa Rica, but as Louise says, her choice to come back to the school was fueled by how much she “missed Jaco, the school, the people, and the environment EVERY DAY” after she had returned home to Sweden.

What really made the experience of surfing in Costa Rica so special for her though was the instructors. “It was a mix of everything” louise says, reccounting what made her experience surfing here so special, “but the most important thing for me was that the instructors were just so amazing!”

Louise’s passion for surfing is what drove her every decision during the time she stayed in Jaco. She credits her passion in part to the surf instructors for teaching her how to “surf with my soul”, something she says “totally changed my world as I knew it”.

Few things can have such an intense effect on a person’s life, but there is something inexpressibly poetic about the way that surfing can change you. Louise surmised her overall experience of surfing with the school by saying: “Its hard to describe- the closest word would be ‘magic’.”