If I have remained conspicuously silent about my life as it is now in Costa Rica, there is a reason: compared to what has recently transpired both my life and the country itself are exceptionally dull.
The former is obviously the easier of the two to explain: having moved the travel bag into storage for the duration and being somewhat gainfully employed, I now have what approaches a routine. As much as I like the consistency after so much that was decidedly not consistent, even I (in retrospect) am bored to tears by the minutiae of my day-to-day.
The country itself is a harder nut to crack. It is wonderfully beautiful and its residents are possibly even kinder than their Central American brethren, but still it leaves me wanting. Let me put it this way: after so many weeks on the road, in so many alarmingly different cultures whose various eccentricies prompted no small number of ¨only in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.,¨ I find it all but impossible to say the same thing about Costa Rica. Wonderful it is, but different it is not. I mean, perhaps it is exceptional for its normalcy - the banal has historically been in short supply in this neck of the woods - but as beautiful, orderly, and safe as it is, at times I think I am no longer in Central America but rather Middle America.*
I like it here a lot, don´t get me wrong - I even like my job, such as it is - but I do miss the sense of adventure.
* This may mean nothing to the rest of you, but when I saw, in the central market of San Isidro, market stalls not only with electricity but refrigeration you could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, imagine it - fish that stays cold from the catching all the way to the cooking... This is certainly a land more akin to Grand Rapids than Guatemala.
1 comment:
...sorry..should have proofread...glad to read that you're well, albeit bored. If that Costa Rica gig falls through, we're always in the market for a dog walker. The pay sucks but there will be Indian food.
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