Costa Rica Through New Eyes

I had not seen my parents for 10 months when we picked them up from the San José airport on a rainy Thursday afternoon last week. At 24 years old, it is the longest I have been apart from them. I thought I would cry, but I didn’t. We were all happy and a little in shock to be seeing each other’s faces so far away from Texas.

When Joe and I told my parents that we had decided to live in Costa Rica, my mom was a little sad and worried, but mostly supportive, saying, “Might as well do it while you’re young.” My dad didn’t get it. “I don’t understand why anybody would want to leave Texas or the United States of America,” he said countless times. Every time we talked to him on the phone after we moved, he tried to convince us to come running back: “You belong here, and we want you home.” He also resisted his and my mom’s visit to Costa Rica, but eventually went to the passport office, took off his cowboy hat, and had his photo taken. It was my chance to show them what this country means to me.

During their week here, we experienced the best that Costa Rica offers the wanderers who somehow end up here. We drank Imperial on the beach underneath umbrellas; gazed down at giant, ancient crocodiles in Tarcoles; shopped for produce at the local market sloppily strung along the sea wall in Quepos; rode narrow-hipped horses to the tumbling Nauyaca Waterfalls; floated down mangrove canals on a clear, cool night; hiked through dense, unscathed rainforest so beautiful that its mere existence is surprising; walked across tiny bridges suspended in air at Rainmaker; swam in chilling pools; and zip lined at fifty miles per hour with a volcano smoking behind us.

Their favorite thing to do was drive around in the rental car along random highways and roads, gazing out the windows and beholding the countryside’s beauty. They never stopped pointing out how “every inch of ground has something green growing out of it.” At Domincalito, a beach in between Dominical and Uvita, we watched a few surfers dance among the mist of ocean meeting air. My mom and I got out of the car and walked for an hour picking up shells and marveling at the giant spiny lobsters washed ashore, as if I were a young girl and she a young mother.

Another day we went out to Naranjito, a small town outside of Quepos, where cows and horses roam the cloud-covered hills. We all commented on the unbelievable sights, as well as the unavoidable boredom that we would surely encounter if it were our home. When we headed to Arenal through the mountains, Mom and Dad enjoyed observing the non-coastal towns of Atenas, Palmares, and San Ramon, with their cute, clean homes and big churches confronted by shady plazas of ice cream and pigeons. To watch my parents observing our adopted home made our dreamlike year seem very real.

Through their eyes (and money and rental car with air conditioning), I was reacquainted with the country that I have fallen in love with, in between bouts of anger and homesickness, time and time again. I thought a lot about our time down here. Some moments were hard, like when we lied on the couch, trying to fall asleep as water flooded through our bedroom and into the hall during last November’s record-setting rains. Some were very good, like when Joe and I spent a day walking the entire length of Playa Cocal in Quepos, collecting sand dollars and waving at families playing soccer in the surf. It was that day that I told Joe I could understand how many people move down here and never leave.

Yet, I have arrived at one of the most common obstacles for people who move abroad—I miss my family and I miss my Texas. When we drove my parents back to the airport, I felt sad for a moment. Then, I remembered that I would be seeing them again so soon, as Joe and I have decided to hang up our expat hats and return to the dry air and rolling hills that we once knew so well.

I don’t know what it will be like for us when we get there. I don’t know if we will fall back into our old lives or if it will be difficult to be in a land that is so different from what we’ve grown accustomed. I can’t tell if I’ll look back on Costa Rica and know that ending our time there was right or if I’ll miss it and the unexplainable adventure it all turned out to be like we longed for Texas all along. As my Dad put it one night, “You have had an experience that you will remember for the rest of your life.” And I wonder if those endless memories will lead us back. But for now, we can’t imagine being anywhere else but on a journey back home to start the next chapter and eat some Tex Mex.

—Lindsay’s Note: Click here to see a list of my all-time favorite Costa Rica things.

Resisting Detachment: Osama’s Death as Experienced by an American Abroad

Our tree house is not equipped with a telephone, and neither my boyfriend nor I have cell phones. This has made some things difficult or impossible. We can’t have pizzas delivered, for example, because we can’t guide the express guy turn-by-turn to our hard to find home. But, thank god, the tree house does have Internet. The usually strong—though sometimes unpredictable—wireless signal beams down from our landlord’s home through thick brush, a ray of hope and knowledge that makes it possible for me to do research for my job, upload photos of our lives, and keep in touch with family and friends. And, last Sunday evening, it enabled me to find out just minutes after the news was announced that US Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden.

I was checking my Facebook page, as I do much too often throughout the day. At the top of my news feed was a status update from my sixteen year old niece: “R.I.P Osama Bin Laden: World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 – 2011).” I wondered if she was simply making a joke, or if in fact, the world’s most hated and sought after terrorist had finally been killed. I checked CNN’s website. It was true. He was dead.

I went back to my Facebook page and more Osama status updates were rolling in: “Osama bin Laden is dead … Staying up late to watch Obama,” said a guy who was my editor at the University of Texas’s newspaper; “DC Anybody? I’m only 30 minutes out. Let’s celebrate!” said another guy I went to school with from kindergarten to senior year, who is now a media relations person for the US Air Force; an old neighbor who has moved to Brooklyn said, “Feels like a good time to be in New York.”

For the next thirty minutes, Joe and I watched the varying Facebook status updates come across my news feed from friends back in Texas, people in other states, and friends who are living abroad. Many were fiercely patriotic. Others tried to be funny in an appropriate manner. Most called upon God to continue to bless the United States.

Upon hearing such major and historically important news, I noticed that I felt a little something. I asked myself if I was happy that Osama bin Laden was killed. Yes, I am, I told myself. Mostly, even though I thought the news was undeniably positive, I wasn’t very affected by it. I was surprised, but not in shock. I was happy, but not ecstatic. I felt somewhat proud of my country, but not enough to compose a heartfelt Facebook status update. Later, while Joe was on the computer, keeping up with the Facebook updates and trying to stream President Obama’s speech, he looked at me lying on the bed. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Reading poetry,” I said. “You’re reading poetry!? he said, mocking me. “This is huge! Get over here!”

The next day, I was sitting at the kitchen table working. It was the month’s busiest day and I was flustered with the pile of tasks that needed to be completed. Joe kept bothering me to look for Obama’s complete speech on YouTube. But I didn’t feel like taking the five or so minutes to watch it. Despite my recently discovered pride and love for America—which unveiled itself about five months after I left American soil for the jungles of Costa Rica—I noticed that I was feeling rather detached from all of the fuss surrounding Osama’s death. I have been away from the States for almost eleven months. I don’t keep up with American news—or any news for that matter—as well as I once did. We don’t have TV so I don’t have access to the limitless information provided by cable news. We are very much loners up in the tree house and don’t have many American friends who we talk with on a regular basis. So, it was almost as if I were a foreigner—albeit one who looks positively upon America—experiencing the event as an outsider.

Joe, on the other hand, was very into it all. Ignoring my apathy, he sat down and opened his computer and began watching different news reports. He read me important bits of information, or things that he found cool about the story. I realized that I liked hearing the news in the background. It reminded me of being at my parents’ house, where Fox News is on every day.

And then, I read a news story discussing global Islamic leaders’ response to Osama’s “burial at sea.” Most of the men quoted in this article said that US forces did not give him a proper burial, according to strict Islamic law, and one suggested that the Navy Seals should have released Osama’s body to his family so that proper respect could be paid. I found this ludicrous. What respect does any American owe that man?

On Tuesday afternoon, I read a story posted on Yahoo’s homepage that talked about different TV and radio personalities’ responses to Osama’s death. It was something Daily Show host John Stewart said that gave me chills:

“They apparently wanted an ideology competition, and for all of our rights and wrongs, all al-Qaeda seems to have come up with is, ‘Uh, we killed some Americans.’ They have nothing. Can they still do damage? I’m sure. But we’re back, baby.”

Now, I am beginning to feel less like a foreigner and more like the American I am. I see Osama’s death as a victory for the United States, as justice for what happened on September 11, 2001. For the first time since the 2008 Presidential Election, I feel proud of my home country and of my government. I suppose I just needed some time, and a comedian’s serious, touching words, to remember why it is that I now agree with my father when he says, “America is the greatest country on Earth.”

When I’ve Finally Gone Crazy

Living in a tree house is a great experience. There are daily monkey visitors to observe, interesting bugs to investigate and endless beauties of the jungle to behold. It is always peaceful, often inspiring, and sometimes surreal. But, it is not perfect.

Our tree house consists of one small room that probably measures about 300 square feet. It is so tiny that sometimes I feel its walls closing in and my brain exploding into utter insanity. The entire home is about the size of our living room back in Texas, and I share it with my boyfriend and a very energetic dog.

In this cramped space, I am never alone. Joe and I are constantly around each other. At dinner, we don’t have much to say because we know every move the other has made throughout the day. When I go the bathroom, I can see him through the vertical spaces in the bamboo door. And he can see me. Sometimes Happy even crawls under the door to visit.

The lack of a bedroom or office for me to work and gather my thoughts in has had a negative effect on my writing, which I prefer to do in a space all my own, where I can focus and attempt to be creative. Instead, I sit three feet away from Joe, who practices his electric guitar, plugged into an amp, every day for four to five hours. Yes, he’s getting very good. And I am getting very tired of hearing it all. Other than the noise, sometimes the mere feeling of his presence, never more than six feet away, gets under my skin.

“We are actually insane,” I told Joe the other day after we finished observing just how small our home actually is.

“Yes, we are,” he confirmed.

“It’s amazing that we’re still together,” I add, and we both laugh, knowing that we’ll stick it out.

The tree house gets hot, too. Before the past week’s recent rains, the end of March and beginning of April were proving to be miserable. Because our walls are just screens, we have no air conditioning. Sometimes a delightful and very welcome breeze blows through the jungle and into our home, but there are some very still days when sweat beads form all over my body as I sit at the kitchen table. Joe has taken to going shirtless every day. Sometimes I’ll wear my swimsuit top. But usually I just lay on the bed for frequent and lengthy intervals. How I ever lived in an old ranch house with no A/C until I was nine years old continues to amaze me.

We do have a ceiling fan, which our landlord installed just before we moved in. And thank god he did. We run it so incessantly that when the power goes off—as it periodically does—and the blades slow down to a stop, Happy stares up at the mysterious big brown object with fear in her eyes.

Me, very sweaty and in a bad mood

Because our place is so small, we take Happy on two walks a day. Doing this is like willingly plunging into the fires of hell. And because we don’t have a car, walking into town—or worse, walking the completely uphill route back—is a similar experience. If I leave the house between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., I can confidently say that I will return soaked, red, and smelly. Despite seven months in Quepos, I have not fully adapted to the humidity and the sun that beats us down. I am able to walk for longer periods of time, but the sweat still flows as it did on my first day here and I continue to wish I could be like all of the beautiful Ticas who walk around town without seeming to shed a drop of sweat.

Walking Happy up the hills in La Zona Americana

To avoid driving myself over the edge, I try to not leave the tree house during the very hot hours. And so does Joe. We stay at home, annoying and arguing with each other, telling jokes and dancing for no reason. We are two jungle hermits going crazy while trying to stay sane.

Sleepwalking Through a Dream

Cuba is a place that I cannot figure out. I cannot form a general opinion on it. I cannot write a summary about it. Each moment that I was there was like waking up from a dream that I could not fully remember. The country swept me up and all I could do was simply exist in it, effortlessly and naturally, as if I had been there long enough for it to be my home.

I suppose all of this sounds special. But when I try to describe an extraordinariness about Cuba—because I feel like I should after having read so many general touristy writings that call it mystical and magical and powerful—I am mostly blank. Its force is unexplainable and fluid. It is usually silent and invisible, only sometimes tangible in the night’s chilling winds.

Numb

Joe and I arrived in Havana on a Wednesday afternoon. The airport was old and smelled of a strange scent that I would later notice on many Cubans. Cigars, musk and a touch of sweet flower like gardenia or honeysuckle. Passing through immigration and customs was simple, and the officials were nice, despite a concerned look in their eyes.

The Rampa

A bus transported us to our hotel in the Vedado district of Havana. We walked the Rampa, a wide and busy street with many locals hanging out on the sidewalks. We watched them, stared at the billboards celebrating socialism and anniversaries of the revolution, and pointed at classic American cars on every street. When the sun began to set, we walked to the Malecón—a five-mile stretch of road and sidewalk along the seawall—and sat down on the stone ledge, with waves washing up on the dark, jagged rocks below. Instead of feeling in awe of the famous city, I felt numb.

The Malecón at night

Maybe I was just tired from the flight, I thought. Joe mentioned that Cuba seemed like many other places in Latin America that we have been and I said, “Yeah, it is.” The area we were walking in was, more or less, like Panama City or San José or a mix of both. But in other places, I did not feel this strange emptiness. I had built Cuba up in my mind, in a deep way, and formed expectations of what I would feel when I was there. I thought I would feel astonished, changed, complete. But instead I felt like I was drifting through the air.

The next day we headed to Habana Vieja, the oldest part of the city. Gazing out of the smudgy bus window, we began to enter the crumbling Havana that I had seen in photographs, a city much different than any other place. We rode in the bus for blocks, and after Joe and I skipped out early on the city tour, walked for hours through this massive and glorious dilapidation immune from the passage of time.

Book Market in Plaza de Armas

We went to the Museum of the Revolution, which described itself as containing “all of history,” walked among the people in the streets, passed by stores selling beautiful paintings and by restaurants with top notch bands playing salsa and other kinds of Cuban music. We walked through the plazas of benches and trees and fountains, some of which were being restored with UNESCO funds. We went to the camera obscura and gazed at the city from eight flights up. I was shocked by its extreme size and soft glow. That night, Joe and I walked to the Malecón and sat among dozens of Cubans who were drinking rum, singing and talking. The wind blew and chilled us and we kissed and talked until the cannons shot off at nine. We began walking to our casa particular and it was if we had always known the way.

Us and Them

“Cuba has two currencies: CUCs y CUPs,” our bus driver explained to an older, feisty woman who was determined to get her hands on some of the local currency. “Tourists need CUCs. CUPs are for Cubans. There is no reason for a tourist to need them.”

But later that day, Joe and I discovered that there is a very good reason to have some CUPs on hand: ice cream. We had heard about a huge ice cream park with stunning prices and delicious treats so we set about finding it. We stumbled upon it while walking the Rampa. Entering an interesting circular structure, we looked at the various ice cream stands and the hoards of Cubans lined up to dig into the scoops that cost four cents each. According to a sign posted in the park, the ice cream stand was a dream of Fidel’s.

We picked the stand with the most people in line and waited for about fifteen minutes. When it was our turn to find a table, the waiter noticed our Western looks and told us to go to another stand around the curve that accepted CUCs, because this stand only took CUPs. We went to the CUC stand and everything cost about $4 to $6. So we left.

The next day, we acquired some CUPs at a cafetería Cubana, which is a little window in somebody’s home where people sell cheap food options like pizza slices with very little cheese and strange tasting tomato sauce, fresh guava and orange juices, bread rolls with butter or a pink mystery spread called “pasta,” and rice and beans. The food we ate at the windows never tasted very good, at best was okay, and made us a little nauseated after eating it for our first week in Cuba. But we could have dinner or lunch for about one or two dollars and, based on the looks we got, we realized how strange it was for locals to see tourists joining them to eat.

Later that evening, we went back to the ice cream park packing some CUPs. But this time, there was an armed policeman standing at the entrance. We tried to ignore him but he pointed us toward the tourist stand. But we have CUPs, we told him in Spanish. He was firm and explained that we could not eat at the CUP stands. We were not accustomed to being segregated so blatantly. I assumed the government fears the mingling of outsiders with their people, to whom they feed propaganda.

After three days in Havana, we took a bus to Varadero, which had the prettiest beaches I have ever seen. But the town was mostly tourists and all-inclusive resorts. A few days later, we took off for Trinidad, said to be “one of the finest colonial towns in all the Americas.” We encountered a poor, beautiful city of hustlers. I had read that touters in Havana would be very annoying, but I did not find them to be so intrusive. Many just asked us if we needed a taxi or where we were from. After a “No, gracias,” most left. But in Trinidad, they were a little more intense and followed us down the street, talking fast and very loudly in hopes of renting a casa or selling a necklace. Every day, the owner of our casa, an older African-Cuban woman, sent multiple people up to our room in hopes of sharing some of the profit from a cigar, horseback riding tour or taxi to the beach.

One day, in search of a window cafetería, we were walking around Trinidad’s maze of narrow streets and brightly colored, peeling home fronts. Far away from the tourists who dine under umbrellas and photograph churches, we found ourselves on a busy road with vegetable stands, meat hanging in windows, dogs running through the dust and locals everywhere. People looked at us and watched us eat pieces of bread. We sat down on a raised sidewalk and tried to pretend that we were not giving them a reason to stare.

“Our Situation”

Traveling in Cuba offers a rare first-person opportunity to learn the country’s story, far beyond anything you can read in a book. The history lesson never ends and the questions always remain.

We learned much from avoiding expensive tourist areas and walking around on foot, passing things like stores with merchandise kept behind glass cases and guards controlling customers’ entering and exiting. After being in Cuba for a few days, it became easy to think that every thing was somehow connected to pervasive governmental control.

One night in Trinidad, Joe and I sat on the rooftop terrace of our casa particular, watching fires burning bright in the nearby mountains and smoke floating into the painted sunset. We joked that the government was burning books and Fidel’s secret documents. “Maybe it’s Fidel’s porn collection,” Joe said and we both laughed. We were drinking Havana Club rum and listening to music on my laptop—The Beatles, Elton John, Merle Haggard. A few people passed in the dirt street below and I wondered if they had ever heard this music. And if they had not, what did it sound like to them?

I also learned much of Cuba’s story through a Cuban friend, who shared her thoughts quite openly when we met up a few times in Havana. “It is very complex, very complicated,” she said about the way the communist government runs the country. She referred to this as, “Our situation.”

Every month, one family is allotted ten pounds of rice, one pound of lettuce, a half-pound of chicken, one slice of bread per person per day, and some beans, coffee, and a few other things. “It is not enough,” she told us. Each month she earns about 30 CUCs, which is about 30 US dollars. She has her PhD, speaks fluent English, and works for an important governmental office. The government gives her permission to travel for her job, but she must find financial sponsorship from a non-Cuban organization, company, or government institution. Through doing this, she has traveled to Canada, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela, and Mexico. “It is important to see how the world works,” she told us, “because Cuba is like a vacuum.”

The government is beginning to implement more capitalist policies, like encouraging private enterprise and allowing the people to have cell phones. Perhaps this opening is the reason behind the many American imports we encountered throughout our trip, like Ben Affleck movies and the Disney Channel, Coca Cola and its popular brand Fanta, and sparse Facebook spottings. Still, it did not make total sense how Cuba would obtain some of these things considering the U.S. embargo on the island, which all Cubans refer to as el bloqueo, or the blockade.

Recently, both the Cuban and United States governments decided to allow the many Cubans who have fled to Miami to send money back to their family members still living on the island. These people now “have everything they want, everything they need,” my friend told us. In the beginning, every Cuban was supposed to be equal, she said, but now the system is not fair. Her parents were born before the revolution and they remember everything. “They preferred before the revolution,” she said, noting that she thinks the majority of Cubans nowadays are not happy with the current state of things. “Many people are hoping for a change.”

—

I recently read a travel piece in the New York Times in which the author proposed that lands soon to be in a state of conflict often have a quality of suspense, or even one of boredom. “Nothing happens for long periods,” the author wrote, “and then everything happens at once in indescribable confusion.”

This theory could explain why Cuba felt so strange to me. The country is drifting, eerily and without aim, and the people are waiting for something to happen, for their lives to be changed. And perhaps their wait is almost over.

Lessons Learned

View of Havana Vieja from the top of the hotel where Hemmingway used to stay.

On our fourth day in Cuba, we boarded a bus for the beach. We had spent three unbelievable days in Havana, weaving through the crumbling colonial maze of streets and plazas. Now we would be leaving to spend three days in Varadero, a place that many tourist websites told us has the most beautiful white sands and aqua waters in the world.

The bus was nice, recently imported from China—one of the few countries that will trade with Cuba, as it knows the United States will never punish it for breaking the broad trade embargo against the Caribbean island. As we were sitting in our plush seats surrounded by refreshing air conditioning, we all heard a loud noise. The driver pulled over to the side of the road and got off the bus. After a few minutes, he came back and drove on.  He repeated this stop-and-go routine several more times. Sometimes the guide would step off of the bus with him. Neither told us what was happening.

Joe and I sat in our seats waiting to find out what was going on but not really caring if we did, as long as we arrived in Varadero at some point that day. Then we noticed two travelers sitting behind us becoming obviously upset. The man talked loudly in German, using a tone of voice that indicated a significant amount of displeasure. He started yelling to the front of the bus in English, “Isn’t anybody going to tell us what is going on with the bus? Why do we stop and go, stop and go?”

I thought this was a little funny because I myself was curious. After she heard the man’s loud questions, the tired guide walked to the back of the bus and told them that the driver hit another bus, which broke our bus’s right mirror. He was trying to fix it, but wasn’t having much luck so another bus might come to pick us all up.

She sat back down and the driver drove on for a bit and then stopped again, this time not pulling off of the road very much, but staying in the right lane of the two lane one-way road.

“This is dangerous!” the man yelled. “Take us to a restaurant or something! Use your tiny little brain, you idiot!” Joe and I looked at each other, our gazes signifying that we both thought these words were inappropriate and obnoxious.

About two months earlier, Joe and I had been on a bus from Jacó to Quepos. It was a cool night and with the windows open, a comfortable ride. Then the bus stopped in the road. We noticed a line of cars stretched ahead of us and after about fifteen minutes, many of the passengers got off the bus. We looked out the windows and saw other people who had exited their cars walking toward us. Then we saw an ambulance.

We waited on the bus for about forty-five minutes, reading some magazine a Jehovah’s Witness had given us a few days earlier. When we grew bored, we decided to go outside. We approached a crowd of Ticos standing around, watching the paramedics and firefighters deal with the car accident as if they casually were watching TV.

Walking back to the bus, we passed Ticos hanging out at their friends’ cars, talking and laughing to pass the time. We waited for about an hour more and not one person seemed upset.

So the mirror ordeal in Cuba and the way the driver was handling it seemed very insignificant and unworthy of our angst. As requested, we were taken to a restaurant and almost everybody lit up a cigarette. An older man had a cigar.

“What I don’t understand is why the broken mirror is such a big deal,” I told Joe while we debated whether or not to buy some beers despite it not yet being noon. “In Costa Rica, they’d just keep going.”

I might actually like Costa Rica’s laid back, frequently lawless (or law enforcement-less) society, I thought, ignoring that the yelling man had a legitimate point regarding our safety, as well as the numerous times I have cursed the constant pura vida attitude when its consequences were not in my favor. Nevertheless, in this particular moment, I felt freedom in not caring.

A new bus came after about thirty minutes. We all re-boarded and were on our way again.

[Lindsay's note: Due to an unfortunate instance in which we overlooked the possible need to charge our digital camera, it died on day 3 of our 11-day trip in Cuba and we had no charger with which to revive it. Sincerest apologies to all my readers (and to myself!) for the lack of numerous photos to illustrate the beautiful and interesting country. I hopefully will be getting two disposable cameras developed in the next week or two and will be able to include some of those photos in my upcoming additional post on Cuba.]

Small Town Games

The small town of Quepos, as seen from our old apartment, Lindo Atardecer

I grew up in a rural Texas town with a population of 800-and-something so I know all about small town life. I know what it is like to randomly run into my fourth grade teacher, who also taught my sister, brother and uncle, and was taught as a girl by my grandmother. And what it is like to go out to the town’s only bar during a visit home from college and see so many people from high school that I wanted to return to my car and drive away in the quiet night.

Despite this rigorous preparation, I still experience a mixture of surprise, delight, and annoyance when I see all of the same people all of the time around the streets of Quepos. One day Joe and I were waiting at the bus station in the central part of town. After realizing that we had seen numerous acquaintances and friends passing by, we decided to make it into a competition: Let’s see who can see the most people we know. The game helped pass the time and since has been a welcome and surprisingly satisfying form of entertainment in our simple lives. When we’re out and about with not much to say to each other, we start naming and counting.

Usually, the people we see most often are taxi drivers.

“There’s Nicolas,” Joe will say pointing at the cherry red SUV carrying the nice man who has helped us move apartments a couple of times. Point Joe.

“There’s the really nice taxi guy, the one who takes us up to Zona Americana,” I said one night while sitting at the window of Wacky Wanda’s bar. “I don’t know his name,” I admitted, suspecting that Joe might not agree to give me the point.

“The kind of big guy?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Okay, we definitely know him so that’s a point,” he relented.

As nice and helpful as they are, our taxi friends are the least exciting subjects to spot. Constantly driving around town and working long hours, they are easy targets. And most are your average Tico guy—nice and normal. The ones I am always overjoyed upon seeing include people like Flaca, a local homeless woman about six feet tall and 112 pounds. Thin as a blade of grass, she struts down the pavement, always wearing a standout outfit that usually consists of a bright sequined top and tiny little skirt. I recently heard through the Quepos grapevine that Flaca used to be quite gorda, but now that she isn’t, she likes clothes so much that she will mop the floors and scrub the grout of local clothing boutiques in exchange for merchandise.

Another favorite is a Japanese man, who owns Tropical Sushi, a tasty joint by Gran Escape. Once, he caught me staring at him rolling our sushi. He smiled and pretended to spit in the food. He also works out at Joe’s gym, Mucho Musculo. According to Joe, he enters with a plastic bag, says hola to the gym attendant, walks to the wooden exercise platform, bows slowly, walks to the side to kick off his flip flops and set down his plastic bag, and then takes the platform to perform an intense hour long sequence of martial arts in front of the mirror. “And then at the end, he does a bunch of pushups,” Joe told me. “I’ve never seen him do anything different.”

Then there are those who are not necessarily the most interesting, but this might be because we just haven’t known of them long enough. These include Surfer Guy, the boyfriend of a Nicaraguan woman who owns a tasty and popular café in Quepos. He has long, thick beach blond hair and she is about 10 to 15 years older than him. Another is the bartender from the bar next door to Wacky Wanda’s. He is North American and has very long, dark brown hair with some gray, always worn in a ponytail. Once we spotted him at the Coca Cola station in San Jose, waiting for the directo to Quepos. We heard about a recent situation he had with a prostitute, who is known by locals to be a man underneath the sparkly dresses and high, high heels. A friend of a local seemed interested in the lady, but the local felt obligated to inform his friend of the lady’s hidden gender. After that, apparently, there was a ruckus between the ladies and the ponytailed bartender, but it was all settled on friendly terms.

And so the game goes. Sometimes we see the same regulars over and over and we are always adding new people to the long list. Javier, the drunk and happy homeless man who likes to invite Joe over for coffee. Wacky Wanda herself. The old hippy couple that gets smashed and dances crazy at Dos Locos. Wiggy, the daughter of the bread man at the market. Bill, our old neighbor who is well known for his unpopular tendencies and with whom we once watched the best sunset of our lives. Roberto, Freddi and Jorge, all former neighbors. The Tico who rides around on his bicycle selling fresh fish that hang from the handlebars. La China, our former apartment manager whose eyes are ever so slightly slanted, giving her the local nickname. And so many more.

That night at Wacky Wanda’s, within an hour and three Imperials, I creamed Joe—seven to two. A handful of Ticos who have lived here their whole lives have told us, “Quepos es el centro del mundo.” Quepos is the center of the world. I have always laughed, almost hysterically, at this thought. But perhaps their statement has more truth to it than I originally thought.

Beware of the Bufo Toad

from James Dowling-Healey at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology

Walking around Quepos right before sunset, the outer edges of town become filled with the soothing sound of dozens of toads croaking in cleared hillsides and empty lots. I always liked this orchestra of amphibians. It reminded me I was far away from home in an interesting land that surrounds me with some pretty amazing forms of nature.

Then, we got our dog Happy. Helpful friends started telling us to watch out for these toads.They apparently have a substance on their skin that can kill a dog in hours. Now, these toads have become my most despised enemy, surpassing the aggressive, off-leash pit bulls at the park, speeding cars on every street, deadly ticks in the grass and worms in the rotting water apples dropped by dining monkeys.

Walking Happy with her best friend and neighbor, Chuleta, following.

About a week ago, Joe and I were taking Happy on her evening walk, and we stopped at our favorite lookout point to watch the sun set near the new marina. I had my eyes off of her for about six seconds. Then I looked down and her teeth were clenched around the stiff and leathery corpse of a toad. I yelled, she dropped it quickly, and Joe kicked it off of the road.

When we got home, I immediately started researching Costa Rican toxic toads on the Internet. I discovered the name of my nemesis: the Bufo toad, also called the Cane or Marine Toad. National Geographic describes the Bufo as a “large, stocky amphibian with dry, warty skin.” They secrete venom through glands near their shoulders, and it is this milky mix of toxins that kills animals like domesticated dogs—and a few reported humans—by disturbing the heart. Symptoms in exposed pets can include drooling, red gums, head shaking, loss of coordination and sometimes seizures.

Their habitat is primarily from Central America down to Amazonian South America, some parts of the Caribbean and they have also been introduced in Australia. In the U.S., where they are an invasive species, they can be found in Florida and Hawaii, and according to some sources, parts of Texas. I read dozens of forum postings in which grieving pet owners from all of these regions mourned their deceased dogs, some of which died just minutes after catching or licking a Bufo toad despite the owners’ desperate attempts to keep them alive.

We weren’t sure if a long dead and dried out toad would have the same serious effect. Joe called our dog groomer in Quepos. She used to live in Zona Americana very close to our tree house and had a dog that survived Bufo toad exposure. Pam takes in street dogs and cats to nurse back to health. She is—in my book—an unofficial expert on many pet concerns. And she can be reached by phone after 5 p.m., unlike the vets in town, even those who include an emergency phone number on their business card.

“If the toad was that dead, it should be okay,” Pam told Joe through my laptop’s speakers. “Watch Happy for symptoms and if any come up, feed her egg whites and call me.”

We rinsed out Happy’s mouth with the garden house and sat around staring at her so intensely that she was definitely a little creeped out.

In the end, we didn’t have to whip up a bowl of egg whites or call back Pam. Happy acted normally through the night, continuing with her usual activities of hunting down June bugs and catching moths from the air. We were very relieved. Now, when I walk Happy, I hold the leash a little tighter. And when I pass a toad, no matter if it is already dead, I curse its existence.

Lindsay’s note: More information on the Bufo toad, toxin exposure in pets, and more can be found here.

Choosing Costa Rica

Because I myself do it all the time, I imagine many other people must wonder what their lives might have been like if they had been born in a different state, grown up in a different city, chosen to attend a different college. The idea that a place can have such an effect on one’s experience weighs so heavy in the mind and it also seems that the grass is almost always greener on the other side. But it is impossible to know the truth of either of these for sure.

When Joe and I decided to leave Texas, we then had to decide where we would go. We knew we wanted to live somewhere affordable and Spanish speaking, and that was about it. So we started throwing around various countries—Mexico, Belize, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica. We did some fairly minor research and decided that Mexico, Belize, and Nicaragua seemed less safe than what we were looking for. Rather quickly, we then decided that Puerto Rico would be too American, as we wanted something totally different.

As far as we know, we made the right decision. Costa Rica has given us different more than we ever expected, and after visiting Puerto Rico last week for our third visa run, we know that we were right about the island being much too tame for what we had in mind.

At the onset of our trip, we arrived at the San Jose airport after a painless three-hour bus ride from Quepos to find ourselves in the Twilight Zone. Every single check-in counter was closed, security was closed, all of the airport shops were closed, and the automatic entrance doors were turned off. The only person working was a man who happily accepted our exit tax payment. We waited by the entrance until 11 pm, when the airport reopened. Costa Rica was embracing us in a tight goodbye hug.

After a three-hour plane ride to Fort Lauderdale, a four-hour layover, and another three-hour ride down to Puerto Rico, we touched down in San Juan for our six-day vacation. We immediately picked up our rental car and headed for Rincón on the opposite side of the island.

Because I haven't driven in 9 months, I was the co-pilot.

The countryside was nice, but not anything special compared to Costa Rica’s mountains, jungles, and ocean views, which I am surprisingly starting to connect with much like I do the rolling Texas Hill Country. The outskirts of many cities seemed quite urban and the smaller towns were clean and charming. The beaches were beautiful, with light to white sand and blue green and sometimes clear water.

 

A day on Gilligan's Island outside of Guanica

While it was interesting and very enjoyable meeting the landscapes and living among Old San Juan’s history and beauty, it was the tangible American influence—on which some might say we overdosed—that characterized our trip the most. We visited multiple Walgreen’s and bought inexpensive vitamins (buy one bottle, get another free!), contact solution (two for $3!), tea tree oil, a fleece blanket for $4, a sizable can of cashews for $2.99, and so much more. We ate spicy chicken sandwiches at Wendy’s and a delicious salad bar at Sizzler and I drank coffee and hot black tea from Starbucks. We came across a Best Buy, which was near a WalMart, and bought a wireless mouse for my computer for $30 and an iPod stereo adapter. We drove on perfectly smooth freeways reminiscent of our old Interstate-35. We spoke Spanish at first, but then learned that almost every single local spoke amazing English. Somewhat surprisingly, I found all of these Westernized aspects of Puerto Rico to be quite glorious during our short vacation.

Behold the glory.

On our plane from Florida back down to Costa Rica, I felt overwhelming hopeless. I suppose I was sad to be leaving the affordable American products, widespread air conditioning, and dry heat. And I was dreading the five-hour collectivo bus ride on a winding mountain road back to Quepos and the amount of energy needed to do our daily chores. But then I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I felt a little better. After returning from this brief, spoiled jaunt with a nearby island, I am again glad that I am here and not there.

Our Night Visitors of the Jungle

Once the ocean swallows the sun in the evening, our tree house becomes a very different place. A totally consuming darkness closes in, joined by the chirps and buzzes of hundreds of crickets and locusts. Some nights a mysterious animal—a white faced monkey perhaps—screams and screeches like it’s being killed or terrorizing something else. As we lay down in bed, another unknown creature rustles in the bushes by our bed and crunches the fallen dry leaves. Happy barks and howls with her piercing puppy voice.

But it’s not the sounds outside that make the tree house a little unsettling—it is our uninvited roommates: moths fluttering about stupidly, small beetles and grasshoppers crawling on the ceiling and chairs, tiny flying bugs plunging to their deaths in our water glasses and boiling pasta. On our first night, I found a foot-long lizard with skin like a rattlesnake hanging out in our shower. After realizing it was harmless, I named it Lester. Not long after, we began to meet visitors too creepy to be considered pets.

Lester

One night while lying on the bed, I noticed some colors moving on the floor. At first, I thought I was staring at the big ants that sometimes carry off remains of dead moths and other lifeless remnants of bugs. But I soon realized it was a five-to-six inch scorpion heading toward Happy at a frightening speed. I ran to get our designated bug catching cup, but by the time I got back, it was gone. After ending our unsuccessful search for the creature, I made myself believe it would all be fine.

Another scorpion, a few days later. This one was tiny compared to the other.

Ants carrying off the body of a dead moth - a procession that takes place each morning.

The next night we encountered a spider the size of my hand. It was clutching the support beam over the bed and I feared it would fall onto us during the night. I favored knocking it down with a broom, but Joe brought up the possibility that upon dropping to the floor, it might run under the bed and crawl into our sheets. So, after he agreed to let me have his side of the bed for the night, we somehow fell asleep with it up there, creeping slowly above us.

The next morning during breakfast, the spider and other bugs were gone. “That spider last night was too big,” Joe said.

“It was. Giant,” I agreed. The following night the spider was back, on a wall farther from the bed. The night after that, it perched on another wall. Our fear of the eight-legged creature has dropped with each sighting, as we begin to come closer to accepting that worrying does us no good.

I now consider us lucky to have had this moment of enlightenment so early on. Since the spider, we’ve come across two more scorpions, a bright green snake slithering through the pebbles outside our front door, and many saddleback caterpillars, one of which stung me and left a painful and itchy rash on my leg for over a week. Our landlord recently mentioned that a boa constrictor has been known to frequent our tree house kitchen. And at this, we were actually able to laugh.

Front Yard Snake

The Saddleback

Our gecko roommates like to lay their eggs in this door bolt space.

So Close to Quepos, Yet So Far Away

Just over a month ago, I was going through a rough bout of homesickness. I missed my family. I missed my cat. I missed my things. And I missed Texas. But then I met a dog. A pretty seven-month-old mix of collie and golden and some sort of spaniel. After some persuasion, my boyfriend, Joe, and I adopted Happy and prepared to leave our one bedroom apartment owned by a 72 year old Italian man with a strange moral objection to the owning of animals.

Happy, 7 months

One morning a few days before Christmas, we found our new home—a jungle tree house within walking distance to the waters of the blue Pacific, far away from the rooster crows and smothering heat of central Quepos. And since we moved in, our lives have been filled with more of the wonder that Costa Rica stores in its seams.

To get to our tree house, we hike uphill for about twenty minutes from the center of town, passing through the old Zona Americana, an enchanted area above the new marina that few vacationers and newly transplanted expats know about. Palma Tica was once headquartered here and its old homes, worn staircases, and natural landscaping remain in beautiful disrepair. Unfortunately the road is in such mal estado that most taxi drivers moan when we tell them our destination, or they refuse. We’ve started a collection of business cards from those who actually seem to enjoy the ride as a break from the mundane.

At the top of the forested ridge overlooking Playa Macha sits our square home. One side rests on the top of a hill and the other three walls stand high above the ground of the steep slope, supported by a few wooden boards driven into the moist soil below. Several trees help to hold the home’s weight, three of which are on our back porch, and one of which grows through our shower. I can’t decide how I feel about this tree, as its charm definitely conflicts with the amount of space it takes up in the tiny bathroom.

a side view

I love and hate this tree.

The walls aren’t solid, but are made of screens, so the dark teak wood of the house is brightened with natural sunlight all day. During breaks from work, Joe and I open the sliding screen doors and sit on the back porch, listening to the breeze stirring the dense green jungle around us and watching the titi and capuchin monkeys swing around in search of leaves and seeds.

Typical Day

A Titi Visitor

Happy has developed an intense fear or hate—I can’t tell which—for the monkeys. First it was solely directed toward the white faced monkeys, but now it also applies to the seemingly harmless titis. When she sees or hears them approaching the house tree by tree, her ears perk up, her eyes become focused, and then she lets out that painful, piercing bark and howl. She’s likely trying to protect her territory. But what she doesn’t realize is that we’re in their neighborhood.

Even after eight months living in Costa Rica, I am surprised when I compare my life here to what it used to be. I no longer commute an hour in rush hour traffic every day. I don’t even have a car. Or a cell phone. My days aren’t spent at a desk wishing I were outside because now I pass my time in a tree house watching monkeys hang from their tails. As I start my 20-minute uphill, sweaty hike to yoga two mornings a week, I am greeted by a crisp view of the distant green mountains. Every evening we watch the sun set into the ocean. So, when I start longing for Tex Mex and air conditioning and gigantic grocery stores, I remind myself to open my eyes.