I traveled to San Jose a day earlier than I'd planned. The rain was so heavy on Tuesday night and Wednesday that the rivers were flooding in Parrita. Karen´s spanish tutor came and suggested if I was leaving I should go then and not wait, just in case the bus to San Jose couldn´t pass later. So I went straight to Quepos and bought a ticket on the 2:30 directo and returned home to pack.
Karen sang Feliz Cumpleanos a mi just before I left. I made a birthday wish as I blew out my candle. Then, headed up the hill with my suitcase to catch the bus.
It was the longest bus ride ever. A guy I know from town, one I usually say hi to and keep walking, was excited to find me and my suitcase at the bus stop. I was less than excited as he sat down next to me on the bus. Small town. I was sort of looking forward to some quiet, reflective traveling as I made my journey from new home to old home for the first time in 10 months, but instead was squished between the window and a typical tico: no respect for personal space. I avoided his intentional arm presses and too intense stares the entire ride. I curled up in the corner like a shrimp, fidgeting every time he moved to make his arm touch mine again. He looked at me at one point and said, ¨You must be really difficult to sleep with! You move around alot!¨ Ay yay yay. Ticos. When I made it obvious I didn´t feel like talking, he pulled out his book. But then proceeded to laugh out loud and interrupt my own reading to tell me what he´d just read. He asked why I didn´t want to talk. Being polite, I told him I was tired. He challenged, ¨Why, what did you do today?¨ I wanted to say that I´d had breakfast, rushed to Quepos, packed to travel and lugged a suitcase up a mountain in the rain and put up with listening to him for two and a half hours, but instead I just looked out the window. The mountains were still amazing despite the distraction. Mounds of green earth, layer upon layer, some bigger, some smaller, but all so big and vast they reached right up to the clouds as if offering their trees to the sky. Ah, Costa Rica!
And now, the city.... It´s pouring. It´s grey. It´s cold. Everyone is in pants wet up to the knees and walking fast. There are so many umbrellas to duck and dodge! It´s like an obstacle course. Ah, but again, those mountains in the distance...they make it all ok. They contain the city in such a way that it can quite take hold. All the structure here just seems false in comparison.
Yesterday, I said that there was nothing at all comfortable about Juanca's apartment. And then I came in from a day of navigating San Jose in the pouring rain in a pair of Havaianas, the only shoes I brought since Mario gave away my only pair of real shoes. My long pants, necessary for the chill were wet more than halfway up. I made some chamomile tea, smoked a little joint and dug my comfiest sweatpants and pair of long socks (chamo print, of course!) out of my suitcase. I found a good radio station, audible from the open kitchen window, and the chair overlooking the river from the balcony. Comfort.
The river is unusually high, flowing fast enough to have white water. For the most part, though, it's the color of tea with milk for all the mud being stirred by the flow. The clouds are moving in the opposite direction, spechterlike in their drift across the peaks of the distant mountains. Which one is the volcano, I'm wondering. Juanca said one of them is Irazu.
A cab driver asked me earlier today which I prefer: mountains or beaches. I said I like either, just not the city. He said he likes the mountains better, prefers the cold to heat, but agrees about the city. "When it's raining in either of the other places, the mountains or the beach, it's good," he said, "but in the city, when it's raining, it's awful." I agreed, feeling the chill in my feet and all the way up to my knees under my wet pants. I prefer barefeet. It's that simple. So warm is better for me. But people I love and miss are in a city where it's most likely colder than here even. Especially coming from the beach. I was worried it'd be a rough transition back, but it seems I'm getting eased back into it gradually. There won't be palm trees, but there's a brown river or two in Philadelphia.
A lavender sky backdrop for the upraised hands of the pipa trees, slender fingers reaching skyward, deepens so subtly, bleeding into indigo, as if night is being airbrushed in. Good night, Costa Rica.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
Fusion
This is MY taxi
It´s coffee to go, I swear!
Karen maxin´urban style(in Juanca´s hat!)
The view from Juanca´s place
Doorway Buddhafusion: (n.) A merging of diverse, distinct, or separate elements into a unified whole.
Home. I´ve been using the word frequently as of late. I just got home from San Jose to apply for a new passport so that I can go home to celebrate my birthday. As we rattled across the bridge into Quepos, sun just setting and leaving the sky molten gold across shades of blue, the tide was high and as I looked out across the endless stretch of ocean, I sighed and thought, home!, grateful for the end of the long bus ride, hectic day, long weekend. I felt an emptiness even for the glad relief because home used to be Cain wagging his tail and jumping up to kiss my face.
What is home anyway?
As we stepped off the bus into San Jose on Sunday, Karen joked about us being fish out of water, she in her clamdiggers and tank, me in a long flowing skirt and tube top, both in flip flops and sunglasses. Ah, but it´s just the clothes, I thought, as I looked around at all the jeans and shoes surrounding us. We slipped back into our urban selves to pound the pavement with everyone else despite our almost barefeet.
Karen had never been to San Jose before, so before heading to Juanca´s home away from home where we´d be staying overnight, we wandered awhile attuning to the bustle. We´d agreed even before leaving Manuel Antonio that we would go to the movies while in the city. I haven´t seen a theater in a year! So we stopped at a newsstand to check out the listings and asked the vendor for the closest cinema. He suggested the one in San Pedro was best and I felt a pang of nostalgia. Home.
My experience here began almost exactly a year ago, staying with a host family in Barrio Roosevelt near the heart of little San Pedro. My Spanish was nil and my travel experience slight. Then, then I was a fish out of water.
At the end of every yoga class, as we all rise back up from the hard work and much-deserved rest, I always ask the students, eyes closed and focused inward, to pause and make note of what has changed since they stepped onto their mat. My own practice has become my life, the earth my mat, and I felt myself on the brink of a similar reevaluation...
As the taxi headed to the Mall of San Pedro, I chuckled and told Karen we couldn´t go home that night without a visit to the old neighborhood hangout, Fuzion. Pulling up, I told the story of being stuck on the wrong side of the eight lane highway in front of the mall. It was my birthday and I was late to meet my new friends. I had to scurry across all eight lanes, four in each direction with a median I had to climb in the middle, in a pair of strappy gold heels, saying ´gracias!´ to those nice enough to let me pass and ´no gracias!´ to the out-the-window propositions from would-be novios. That was the last time these feet have seen high heels!
We saw a movie called ¨Mirrors¨ (terrible), interestingly enough, and then headed to Fuzion for a bite to eat and a beer.
As we sat at a table, the exact table where new friend (and soon to be roommate) Mike and I had sat planning our first Costa Rican roadtrip, in fact, the same table where we celebrated Tom and Kyle´s promotion to sergeants, the same table where we all pulled together our newfound, though very basic, Spanish to call our Mamas Ticas to say we wouldn´t be home for dinner (No voy a regrasar por la cena esta noche.), life threw up a mirror of its own.
My how I have grown.
Gone is the girl who struggled with words, in both English and Espanol. Gone the girl who matched her high heels to her outfit (ah, but kept flip flops for later in her matching handbag). Gone the confusion of way back then. Gone the fears. Gone the girl who was always seeking, searching answers. Gone.
I have become.
So, what has changed? I asked myself.
I am a woman now. Grown strong. Fluent. Certain. Most of all, I am aware. Completely at home in myself.
I sat at that same old table and shared a burrito with another new friend, and over a Pilsen shared stories of places we´ve been and people we´ve known, all of which, for better or worse, have surely contributed to the making of the two women sitting there sharing.
As we left the embassy on Monday, half-successful and slightly frustrated, I realized that regardless of any definiton of home, I am neither here nor there. I encompass both and everything in between. Urban enough to navigate a foreign city with ease. Beachy enough to embrace both sand and surf with grace (usually!). Capable of communicating across two continents and then some. My home is as vast as the sky.
As we left Juanca´s apartment for the last time that weekend, I bowed to his doorway Buddha and said, ¨Namaste y gracias por compartir.¨ Karen laughed and said, ¨Look at you blending Sanskrit and Spanish!¨ I looked over my shoulder as I unlocked the gate and said, ¨Yup. I am fusion. It´s the way, verdad?¨
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Signs
**Apologies for the delays in posting. I´ve been busy and so am a week behind....
Juan Carlos and I hiked down to Playitas Sunday morning and hung the signs I painted to warn of the crocodile in the river, hoping that people will be more aware with their dogs and children. We found Ariel on the beach, just coming up from surfing and willing to help. We climbed a few trees to get them all hung and still made it back for Karen and I to catch the 9:30 bus to San Jose.
As we waited for our lunch, first stop in the city, we found a local newspaper, La Nacion, sitting on the counter beside us. Karen, ever hungry for Spanish reading, picked it up to read the cover. There was a front page headline and a four page spread on the increase in crocodile attacks in our region in the past 3 weeks. Each article mentioned the lack of municipal support in raising awareness. The excuse is lack of funds to post signage. My signs cost me nothing. Some wood scraps from under Luis' surf school, some paint we had lying around, brushes borrowed from Katrina, my own time and energy to paint and climb a few trees, and help from a couple of friends. It cost nothing at all to save a few lives.
Does this make us community activists?
Juan Carlos and I hiked down to Playitas Sunday morning and hung the signs I painted to warn of the crocodile in the river, hoping that people will be more aware with their dogs and children. We found Ariel on the beach, just coming up from surfing and willing to help. We climbed a few trees to get them all hung and still made it back for Karen and I to catch the 9:30 bus to San Jose.
As we waited for our lunch, first stop in the city, we found a local newspaper, La Nacion, sitting on the counter beside us. Karen, ever hungry for Spanish reading, picked it up to read the cover. There was a front page headline and a four page spread on the increase in crocodile attacks in our region in the past 3 weeks. Each article mentioned the lack of municipal support in raising awareness. The excuse is lack of funds to post signage. My signs cost me nothing. Some wood scraps from under Luis' surf school, some paint we had lying around, brushes borrowed from Katrina, my own time and energy to paint and climb a few trees, and help from a couple of friends. It cost nothing at all to save a few lives.
Does this make us community activists?
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Roots
On Monday, as my new landlord Juanca and I sat on a bench outside the O.I.J. (Pronounced O E Jota, Quepos´version of a sheriff´s office) waiting our turn to talk to a detective about my stolen bag, he asked me if I plan to stay in Costa Rica despite all the recent bad luck. ¨Of course I do,¨ I told him, ¨Plus, having buried Caindog at the beach, I sort of feel like I´ve got roots here.¨ He said, ¨Well, yes, but not for that,¨ and started telling me about his life. He told about living in Switzerland when he was younger, among all the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people, being Latino with dark skin, hair, and eyes. He tried hard to fit in, he said, but felt that his roots were obviously elsewhere, in a place with other dark people like him. Then he told of his move back to Costa Rica, expecting reconnection with his heritage, but finding instead that these people who looked like him treated him like a foreigner as soon as he spoke and revealed the accent he´d acquired speaking another language for so long. ¨I realized,¨ he said, ¨that I was trying to find belonging through other people when the truth is that I was a part of everyplace I´d been all along. I didn´t need to look to another place. My roots are everywhere.¨ I listened in silence, having felt my way through a similar sequence of changes, not really sure if I agreed with him.
Wednesday morning, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and tea, I commented to Karen that I was looking forward to the intercambio I had planned for the day. I worried aloud that we´d been spending too much time with Americans lately, sort of stunting our experience here. An intercambio (Spanglish for interchange) is when two people get together and spend time swapping language lessons in the context of some planned activity. They´re pretty common here. I was going on my first with Jenifer, a Tica who works at a tienda near the beach.
Jeni came to meet me at home around 8am so we could travel together to her home in Damas, a little town just about 20 minutes outside of Quepos. The plan was to have some lunch and coffee at her house and then go kayaking.
The bus dropped us off across the street from a tiny roadside market which marked the entrance to a quaint little Tico town. As we crossed the road, I took in the organized lanes of short, squat tin-roofed homes, all painted in vivid colors, separated by gravel paths and interspersed with palms and tropical foliage. The whole town was framed by distant mountains, lush and green for the rainy season now upon us. ¨¿Muy fea, verdad?¨Jeni asked. I looked at her, thinking she was joking, but then saw her crinkled nose. ¨No way! Just the opposite,¨ I said, and told her about all the buildings and concrete and echoed noise that is Philadelphia. A different kind of beautiful for sure, I said, but I prefer this. She smiled and seemed to relax a bit.
We went into the market to gather some things to prepare for lunch, and I was taken again by the differences between this place and my home. A friendly smile from the man behind the counter of this corner store and familiar conversation as if he and Jeni had known each other every day of their lives, which I´m sure is exactly the case. So very different from the bored or angry scowls from the cashiers back in Fishtown whose only conversation was to tell you how much money you owed. Then, a loaf of bread, a can of sweet corn, a ripe tomato, a bundle of fresh cilantro, a can of tuna, and some mayonnaise, all for 2.500 colones (that´s less than $5!). Even in Quepos, for all the passing tourists, prices are not so much cheaper than the states unless you know where and when to go. Here I was, not just passing through, but feet on the ground in true Costa Rica.
Groceries in arms, we turned down a gravel road outside the store and walked a little ways until we reached a tiny blue concrete house with a porch comprised of bamboo posts and a propped tin roof. The front door was wide open, typical for Costa Rica, and Jeni called in, ¨¡Hola Lily!¨ She turned to me and asked if I´d like to meet her friend. I smiled, nodded, and mentally turned my Spanish up a notch.
Lily stepped out her kitchen door, an oversized and smiling Tica with bright eyes. She was wearing an apron and holding a spoon in one hand. ¨¡Hola!¨she said and kissed Jeni, and even before Jeni finished introductions, she was pressing her plump cheek against mine for a kiss. She squeezed me so hard a laugh escaped as she said, ¨Mucho gusto, Nicole,¨the Tico equivalent for ¨pleasure to meet you¨. Igualmente, I told her as we were invited inside.
A tablecloth of doily lace decorated with cartoon cows, obviously meant for entertaining guests for it´s bright whiteness, was unfurled on the dining room table to encourage us to sit. I immediately took in all the plastic flowers adorning the room, hanging in strands from the ceiling, in vases on tables, in windows, and over the TV (these are also typical decor). As I made my way toward a chair, I noticed and greeted the 14-year-old girl slung sideways, head and legs propped across bulky chair arms, in the living room (delineated only by the back of the sofa in front of the dining room table). Lily introduced her as her daughter Katie. I smiled. She just looked at me, but in a way that let me see what she saw: a blonde-haired gringa with skin darker than hers, blue eyes, and a disaster of an accent, standing in her house smiling stupidly. She got up from her chair, only because her mother insisted, and sat down beside where I´d found my seat. I turned my Spanish up one more notch even as Lily boasted that Katie knows some English, then left the room with Jeni to go get the coffee.
¨Do you speak English?¨ I asked Katie. She stared down at a bowl of soggy corn flakes. ¨Do you understand English?¨ I tried again. I waited a second, feeling out her silence. Mean kid or shy kid? I couldn´t tell. ¨¿Se habla in Espanol?¨ I asked, trying to be funny. She looked up this time, but her eyes weren´t laughing. Como se dice, Yikes? Thank God for Lily, Jeni and the coffee!
As Jeni sat down and sipped her coffee, she told Lily that I´m a yoga teacher. ¨¡Que linda trabaja!¨ Lily exclaimed, rosy cheeked, and Jeni went on to tell her all I´d taught her in my limited Spanish about the benifits of practicing yoga. Katie just stared at me. I told them all about my classes and answered some of their questions, but was secretly grateful when Jeni changed the subject to talk about her boyfriend´s birthday gift. I listened, silently, absorbing the Spanish even for the rapid fire between the two friends. Then, Jeni started telling Lily about seeing one of the neighborhood girls going discreetly into the house of one of the neighborhood boys. ¨Gossip!¨I said, grinning. ¨¿Que?¨ Jeni asked as they both looked to me. ¨Gossip,¨ I repeated. Blank stares made it clear I´d have to explain further. I cranked the Spanish up, yet again, and began describing. ¨When you see a neighbor doing something, or you know a secret about somebody, and you tell another friend about what you know, that´s gossip.¨ ¨¡Chisme!¨ Jeni exclaimed, and then blushed as everyone, including Katie, burst into laughter. ¨Chisme,¨I repeated. ¨Gossit,¨ they all said. The laughter eventually died down with an ¨Ayyyy, Niiiiicollle!¨from Lily. We spent the next few minutes practicing the ¨p¨sound in gossip. Our first word of the day.
Ice broken, our Spanglish lesson continued, informal and entertaining and peppered with giggles (and more Ayyy Niiiicoles). Before Jeni and I gathered ourselves up to go, Katie got her camera and insisted we all pose for pictures together. She kissed me on the cheek and hugged hard just like her mom as we made to leave. She even asked when I´d be coming back again. Apparently, the laughter (whether with or at me I´m still not really sure) blended away our differences.
Jeni´s house was just across the gravel road. A bright green concrete structure with a silver tin roof and a hedge of tropical foliage that edged in a large yard. Three barking dogs, small, smaller, and smallest, were tied alongside their own little houses. The inside of her house was equally green. There was a black and white cat on a kitchen chair and two colored finches in a cage above the couch. The floor was polished concrete, and a baby was staggering around holding on to whatever she could. Jeni picked up her neice and smothered her with kisses saying sweet things in Spanish that I couldn´t understand. She introduced me to her sister who was doing dishes in the kitchen, then invited me to sit down. I sat on the sofa and started watching the telenovela playing on the fuzzy TV while Jeni fluttered nervously around the house. When she finally sat down, she said, ¨My house is very poor,¨ and looked embarrassed. I shook my head no, feeling her anxiety, and said, ¨No, no es pobre. Es sencilla.¨ (No, it´s not poor. It´s simple.) Everything in here is clean and bright,¨ I told her. ¨There isn´t a lot, but what is here seems cared for.¨ Still, she looked ashamed. To ease her anxiety, I suggested that we go make lunch. We shared rice and beans, plus the groceries from the market mixed together in a salad, typical Costa Rican fare, while discussing in both our languages the sorts of food typical where I come from.
After lunch, we changed into bathing suits and headed down the gravel road, palm oil farms on either side of us, to find our kayaks. I had no idea what to expect as far as where we were going to PUT our kayaks, and still didn´t know what to expect even when I saw the mangroves. Soggy banks of dark mud lined a slow flowing chocolate milk colored river. Rio Estero. Mangrove trees descended in jumbled root clusters into the depths of murky water. I walked down to where a small boat was pulled up on shore and noticed the entire surface of a giant mound of dark, wet riverbank shifting and moving. Giant ants, was my first thought, and then I hunkered down closer. Crabs! A colony of hundreds of tiny crabs, the largest no bigger than a bumble bee, the smallest the size of a large ant. Each had one giant white claw rotating in rhythmic circles while snapping open and closed, open and closed, and a normal sized claw, the same dark brown color as the rest of its body, that retrieved whatever the larger claw had captured and either ate or discarded it, dead. Each crab moved independently, giving space to the others around it, but the whole population of the mound seemed to be dancing, robo arms extended, grasping, and rotating overhead as if trying to lasso whatever it could get. It creeped me out a little, their scavenging nature, but as I looked down river at the tangling trees and floating logs, I sort of wished I had a giant-sized robo arm of my own to protect me from whatever might be lurking downstream.
Neither Jeni nor I had ever kayaked before. Even more of a reason why we should have had our own kayaks. But for some reason, we were give one to share. Jeni´s friend Alan, who knows the river very well, came along and paddled behind or alongside us to keep us from getting lost (Mom and Dad, who I´m sure are worrying about now.). We had agreed that I should be in the back since I´m stronger and could probably steer better, but once in the kayak, Jeni couldn´t seem to get the gist of paddling in unison or pausing in her paddling so that I could direct the kayak. It only took me about 5 minutes to figure out that if I used my paddle as a brake by paddling in reverse, I could turn the kayak to navigate the bends in the river, but only if Jeni stopped paddling. Alan pointed out monkeys and lizards that I couldn´t have been bothered to look at (I can see them in my back yard), preferring instead to watch for what might be in the water!
Paddling is hard work, especially when trying to sync up with someone else. In the midst of the exertion, the frustration, and the complete aversion I felt to being tossed into the swampy water, my Spanish failed me completely. The result was two women, one dark and one light, speaking in two different languages, sharing one single vessel, paddling around in confusion and getting tangled up in thick roots.
We turned around and headed back to where we started after about an hour of mismatched paddling, and arrived somewhat dry and only slightly exhausted. I was thinking how I couldn´t wait to get out of that contraption when Jeni stood up and hopped ashore without even looking behind her. I was still sitting, paddle in hands, on the back. I screamed and flailed my arms a few times (apparently quite comically I found out later) before going face first into the muck. It was deeper than it looked I found out as I gurgled under. Next time, I want my own kayak.
I got home, soggy and cold, just as it started to rain in Manuel Antonio. It didn´t matter. I was already wet, and the rain was surely cleaner than what I was covered in. I recapped the day with Karen and then took a hot shower in preparation for the second half of my day.
It was raining hard when we left to go to TEFL. Karen, planning to use the wireless connection there, had her computer in a backpack strapped to her belly and covered with her zipped up raincoat. It wasn´t until we were climbing the hill to the main road that I caught a good hard look at her and burst out laughing. She looked 9 months pregnant and was even waddling to distribute the weight. She looked back at me, smirking, and said, ¨What?! I´m just trying to have the true Tico experience, ¨making me laugh even harder. We´d only gone a few more steps when we saw a man on a motorcycle getting drenched in the pouring rain. ¨That sucks,¨ Karen commented. I agreed. We watched as he cruised by us and then heard him stop suddenly a few feet behind us. We turned to see him looking back at a completely flat rear tire. ¨THAT sucks even more,¨ she said, and I cracked up. Partly because she was right and the way she said it made me laugh, but partly, too, for the ease and understanding between two women from the same country who speak the same language and don´t have to pause to explain what ¨even more¨ means.
Later, after yoga, hanging out in the kitchen waiting for tea water to boil, we had the front door wide open, Tico style. Karen cracked some funny jokes about the tin snowcapped christmas trees mounted on the wall outside our front door. ¨¿En serio?¨ she laughed, ¨¿Neve?¨ I giggled. I´d thought they were odd too, but then stopped noticing them. We´d turned them into the onion hanger when we´d brought our first big bunch home from the feria. They´re onion hangers is all.
Christmas trees in Costa Rica. And snow. Onion hangers. Brown skin. White skin. English. Spanish. Here and there. The stillness between forward and back. Neutral. Turning energy between extremes into something useful. Finding beauty in the starkness of contrast. And laughter, for sure. These, I think, are the keys to navigating culture, to navigating life. To synching up to paddle the same kayak, so to speak. The lesson I´m feeling following these past days is this: Honor your original roots for sure. No shame. Trace ´em back to see how you became who you are. Be proud of every step of the journey to here. Even the dark mucky places. Swim in them, even, willingly or otherwise. Better to know them, I think.
Then, be daring enough to put down new ones wherever you are. Juanca is right. Your roots are wherever you are. Who says you can´t be so big? Whoever it is, I bet they´re pretty small. Put down your seeds anyway, and wait. Give them something to climb.
I´m sure I´ll have more to say on this following my visit back home...
Wednesday morning, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and tea, I commented to Karen that I was looking forward to the intercambio I had planned for the day. I worried aloud that we´d been spending too much time with Americans lately, sort of stunting our experience here. An intercambio (Spanglish for interchange) is when two people get together and spend time swapping language lessons in the context of some planned activity. They´re pretty common here. I was going on my first with Jenifer, a Tica who works at a tienda near the beach.
Jeni came to meet me at home around 8am so we could travel together to her home in Damas, a little town just about 20 minutes outside of Quepos. The plan was to have some lunch and coffee at her house and then go kayaking.
The bus dropped us off across the street from a tiny roadside market which marked the entrance to a quaint little Tico town. As we crossed the road, I took in the organized lanes of short, squat tin-roofed homes, all painted in vivid colors, separated by gravel paths and interspersed with palms and tropical foliage. The whole town was framed by distant mountains, lush and green for the rainy season now upon us. ¨¿Muy fea, verdad?¨Jeni asked. I looked at her, thinking she was joking, but then saw her crinkled nose. ¨No way! Just the opposite,¨ I said, and told her about all the buildings and concrete and echoed noise that is Philadelphia. A different kind of beautiful for sure, I said, but I prefer this. She smiled and seemed to relax a bit.
We went into the market to gather some things to prepare for lunch, and I was taken again by the differences between this place and my home. A friendly smile from the man behind the counter of this corner store and familiar conversation as if he and Jeni had known each other every day of their lives, which I´m sure is exactly the case. So very different from the bored or angry scowls from the cashiers back in Fishtown whose only conversation was to tell you how much money you owed. Then, a loaf of bread, a can of sweet corn, a ripe tomato, a bundle of fresh cilantro, a can of tuna, and some mayonnaise, all for 2.500 colones (that´s less than $5!). Even in Quepos, for all the passing tourists, prices are not so much cheaper than the states unless you know where and when to go. Here I was, not just passing through, but feet on the ground in true Costa Rica.
Groceries in arms, we turned down a gravel road outside the store and walked a little ways until we reached a tiny blue concrete house with a porch comprised of bamboo posts and a propped tin roof. The front door was wide open, typical for Costa Rica, and Jeni called in, ¨¡Hola Lily!¨ She turned to me and asked if I´d like to meet her friend. I smiled, nodded, and mentally turned my Spanish up a notch.
Lily stepped out her kitchen door, an oversized and smiling Tica with bright eyes. She was wearing an apron and holding a spoon in one hand. ¨¡Hola!¨she said and kissed Jeni, and even before Jeni finished introductions, she was pressing her plump cheek against mine for a kiss. She squeezed me so hard a laugh escaped as she said, ¨Mucho gusto, Nicole,¨the Tico equivalent for ¨pleasure to meet you¨. Igualmente, I told her as we were invited inside.
A tablecloth of doily lace decorated with cartoon cows, obviously meant for entertaining guests for it´s bright whiteness, was unfurled on the dining room table to encourage us to sit. I immediately took in all the plastic flowers adorning the room, hanging in strands from the ceiling, in vases on tables, in windows, and over the TV (these are also typical decor). As I made my way toward a chair, I noticed and greeted the 14-year-old girl slung sideways, head and legs propped across bulky chair arms, in the living room (delineated only by the back of the sofa in front of the dining room table). Lily introduced her as her daughter Katie. I smiled. She just looked at me, but in a way that let me see what she saw: a blonde-haired gringa with skin darker than hers, blue eyes, and a disaster of an accent, standing in her house smiling stupidly. She got up from her chair, only because her mother insisted, and sat down beside where I´d found my seat. I turned my Spanish up one more notch even as Lily boasted that Katie knows some English, then left the room with Jeni to go get the coffee.
¨Do you speak English?¨ I asked Katie. She stared down at a bowl of soggy corn flakes. ¨Do you understand English?¨ I tried again. I waited a second, feeling out her silence. Mean kid or shy kid? I couldn´t tell. ¨¿Se habla in Espanol?¨ I asked, trying to be funny. She looked up this time, but her eyes weren´t laughing. Como se dice, Yikes? Thank God for Lily, Jeni and the coffee!
As Jeni sat down and sipped her coffee, she told Lily that I´m a yoga teacher. ¨¡Que linda trabaja!¨ Lily exclaimed, rosy cheeked, and Jeni went on to tell her all I´d taught her in my limited Spanish about the benifits of practicing yoga. Katie just stared at me. I told them all about my classes and answered some of their questions, but was secretly grateful when Jeni changed the subject to talk about her boyfriend´s birthday gift. I listened, silently, absorbing the Spanish even for the rapid fire between the two friends. Then, Jeni started telling Lily about seeing one of the neighborhood girls going discreetly into the house of one of the neighborhood boys. ¨Gossip!¨I said, grinning. ¨¿Que?¨ Jeni asked as they both looked to me. ¨Gossip,¨ I repeated. Blank stares made it clear I´d have to explain further. I cranked the Spanish up, yet again, and began describing. ¨When you see a neighbor doing something, or you know a secret about somebody, and you tell another friend about what you know, that´s gossip.¨ ¨¡Chisme!¨ Jeni exclaimed, and then blushed as everyone, including Katie, burst into laughter. ¨Chisme,¨I repeated. ¨Gossit,¨ they all said. The laughter eventually died down with an ¨Ayyyy, Niiiiicollle!¨from Lily. We spent the next few minutes practicing the ¨p¨sound in gossip. Our first word of the day.
Ice broken, our Spanglish lesson continued, informal and entertaining and peppered with giggles (and more Ayyy Niiiicoles). Before Jeni and I gathered ourselves up to go, Katie got her camera and insisted we all pose for pictures together. She kissed me on the cheek and hugged hard just like her mom as we made to leave. She even asked when I´d be coming back again. Apparently, the laughter (whether with or at me I´m still not really sure) blended away our differences.
Jeni´s house was just across the gravel road. A bright green concrete structure with a silver tin roof and a hedge of tropical foliage that edged in a large yard. Three barking dogs, small, smaller, and smallest, were tied alongside their own little houses. The inside of her house was equally green. There was a black and white cat on a kitchen chair and two colored finches in a cage above the couch. The floor was polished concrete, and a baby was staggering around holding on to whatever she could. Jeni picked up her neice and smothered her with kisses saying sweet things in Spanish that I couldn´t understand. She introduced me to her sister who was doing dishes in the kitchen, then invited me to sit down. I sat on the sofa and started watching the telenovela playing on the fuzzy TV while Jeni fluttered nervously around the house. When she finally sat down, she said, ¨My house is very poor,¨ and looked embarrassed. I shook my head no, feeling her anxiety, and said, ¨No, no es pobre. Es sencilla.¨ (No, it´s not poor. It´s simple.) Everything in here is clean and bright,¨ I told her. ¨There isn´t a lot, but what is here seems cared for.¨ Still, she looked ashamed. To ease her anxiety, I suggested that we go make lunch. We shared rice and beans, plus the groceries from the market mixed together in a salad, typical Costa Rican fare, while discussing in both our languages the sorts of food typical where I come from.
After lunch, we changed into bathing suits and headed down the gravel road, palm oil farms on either side of us, to find our kayaks. I had no idea what to expect as far as where we were going to PUT our kayaks, and still didn´t know what to expect even when I saw the mangroves. Soggy banks of dark mud lined a slow flowing chocolate milk colored river. Rio Estero. Mangrove trees descended in jumbled root clusters into the depths of murky water. I walked down to where a small boat was pulled up on shore and noticed the entire surface of a giant mound of dark, wet riverbank shifting and moving. Giant ants, was my first thought, and then I hunkered down closer. Crabs! A colony of hundreds of tiny crabs, the largest no bigger than a bumble bee, the smallest the size of a large ant. Each had one giant white claw rotating in rhythmic circles while snapping open and closed, open and closed, and a normal sized claw, the same dark brown color as the rest of its body, that retrieved whatever the larger claw had captured and either ate or discarded it, dead. Each crab moved independently, giving space to the others around it, but the whole population of the mound seemed to be dancing, robo arms extended, grasping, and rotating overhead as if trying to lasso whatever it could get. It creeped me out a little, their scavenging nature, but as I looked down river at the tangling trees and floating logs, I sort of wished I had a giant-sized robo arm of my own to protect me from whatever might be lurking downstream.
Neither Jeni nor I had ever kayaked before. Even more of a reason why we should have had our own kayaks. But for some reason, we were give one to share. Jeni´s friend Alan, who knows the river very well, came along and paddled behind or alongside us to keep us from getting lost (Mom and Dad, who I´m sure are worrying about now.). We had agreed that I should be in the back since I´m stronger and could probably steer better, but once in the kayak, Jeni couldn´t seem to get the gist of paddling in unison or pausing in her paddling so that I could direct the kayak. It only took me about 5 minutes to figure out that if I used my paddle as a brake by paddling in reverse, I could turn the kayak to navigate the bends in the river, but only if Jeni stopped paddling. Alan pointed out monkeys and lizards that I couldn´t have been bothered to look at (I can see them in my back yard), preferring instead to watch for what might be in the water!
Paddling is hard work, especially when trying to sync up with someone else. In the midst of the exertion, the frustration, and the complete aversion I felt to being tossed into the swampy water, my Spanish failed me completely. The result was two women, one dark and one light, speaking in two different languages, sharing one single vessel, paddling around in confusion and getting tangled up in thick roots.
We turned around and headed back to where we started after about an hour of mismatched paddling, and arrived somewhat dry and only slightly exhausted. I was thinking how I couldn´t wait to get out of that contraption when Jeni stood up and hopped ashore without even looking behind her. I was still sitting, paddle in hands, on the back. I screamed and flailed my arms a few times (apparently quite comically I found out later) before going face first into the muck. It was deeper than it looked I found out as I gurgled under. Next time, I want my own kayak.
I got home, soggy and cold, just as it started to rain in Manuel Antonio. It didn´t matter. I was already wet, and the rain was surely cleaner than what I was covered in. I recapped the day with Karen and then took a hot shower in preparation for the second half of my day.
It was raining hard when we left to go to TEFL. Karen, planning to use the wireless connection there, had her computer in a backpack strapped to her belly and covered with her zipped up raincoat. It wasn´t until we were climbing the hill to the main road that I caught a good hard look at her and burst out laughing. She looked 9 months pregnant and was even waddling to distribute the weight. She looked back at me, smirking, and said, ¨What?! I´m just trying to have the true Tico experience, ¨making me laugh even harder. We´d only gone a few more steps when we saw a man on a motorcycle getting drenched in the pouring rain. ¨That sucks,¨ Karen commented. I agreed. We watched as he cruised by us and then heard him stop suddenly a few feet behind us. We turned to see him looking back at a completely flat rear tire. ¨THAT sucks even more,¨ she said, and I cracked up. Partly because she was right and the way she said it made me laugh, but partly, too, for the ease and understanding between two women from the same country who speak the same language and don´t have to pause to explain what ¨even more¨ means.
Later, after yoga, hanging out in the kitchen waiting for tea water to boil, we had the front door wide open, Tico style. Karen cracked some funny jokes about the tin snowcapped christmas trees mounted on the wall outside our front door. ¨¿En serio?¨ she laughed, ¨¿Neve?¨ I giggled. I´d thought they were odd too, but then stopped noticing them. We´d turned them into the onion hanger when we´d brought our first big bunch home from the feria. They´re onion hangers is all.
Christmas trees in Costa Rica. And snow. Onion hangers. Brown skin. White skin. English. Spanish. Here and there. The stillness between forward and back. Neutral. Turning energy between extremes into something useful. Finding beauty in the starkness of contrast. And laughter, for sure. These, I think, are the keys to navigating culture, to navigating life. To synching up to paddle the same kayak, so to speak. The lesson I´m feeling following these past days is this: Honor your original roots for sure. No shame. Trace ´em back to see how you became who you are. Be proud of every step of the journey to here. Even the dark mucky places. Swim in them, even, willingly or otherwise. Better to know them, I think.
Then, be daring enough to put down new ones wherever you are. Juanca is right. Your roots are wherever you are. Who says you can´t be so big? Whoever it is, I bet they´re pretty small. Put down your seeds anyway, and wait. Give them something to climb.
I´m sure I´ll have more to say on this following my visit back home...
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