hola todos!
Ok, so here I am in Costa Rica. I've been here for 5 days now, and its been a totally different experience than expected. Firstly, I haven't visited the beach yet, which is one of the first things that I thought I would be doing when I got here. I also haven't seen nearly as many animals as I expected. Damn those expectations. More on that later.
Well, I had a flight muy pessima (bad!), as I was stuck in the middle seat for a red eye flight to atlanta, where I had to wait to board another long flight to San Jose. It was exhausting and I thought Delta sucked, as far as their staff, attentiveness, and all that. Give me Southwest any day.
When I arrived, I headed to Heredia (a college town nearby San Jose) and met up with my couchsurfing host (also named Mario!). He was incredibly welcoming, and we sat around his house for a while, drinking some lovely Costa Rican cafe negro (we all take our coffee black and delicious), chatting, and snacking. The next day was spent mostly exploring Heredia and then heading to San Jose in the late afternoon to walk around the center. We ended up at some bar where we drank the rest of the evening with couchsurfers.
Then, off to La Fortuna, a town nearby Volcan Arenal, the most famous active volcano in Costa Rica. Supposedly its common to see red lava flow from the top at nightime, but it was very cloudy during my two days there. I did go on a fantastic hike near the volcano though, where we passed some monkeys, birds, and some really cool plant life. The best part of this was walking back down at night, in the pitch black forest, with flashlights, before ending up at a lookout spot at the base, where we drank some guaro (the national alcohol) while waiting anxiously for the lava, which never came. Then off to the hot springs- again in near complete darkness- where we relaxed for the next hour.
The other things I've done have been interesting, but mostly in the details. The details are always the crux of a story's uniqueness. I haven't had any grand adventures like on some of my other trips (yet), but the details have been curious and unlike others. The people one meets while travelling always leave an impression, and its been weird being here for less than a week, but surrounded by tranquility, introspection, and talk of tarot, mind mapping, and auras. I have been questioning the purpose of this two week trip, because it seems almost useless to try to capture the essence of a place in such short a time. Perhaps even a year wouldn't do it justice. But I realized immediately that I would never be able to do all the things that I need to in these dos semanas. I can only let the winds surround me, and whisper to me, and breath in the air deep into my lungs, flowing to my brain, and hope that these air bubbles become lodged in my brain and my memory, their significance to be learned only much later.
Its interesting to again run into people who are on months-long odysseys, on their own paths, their own reasons for it, and experiences along the way, but a curious streak run through all of them, all of us, and part of me regrets not being able to spend more time free, without obligations, roaming. But then, I was doing that for a while before, and am happy where I am now, in Chicago, with a sense of stability and the ability to focus my energies on one of my passions: cinema. I need a base, a home, the ability to not worry about basic parts of my life (shelter, food, my possessions), so that I can spend my energies instead on creating and filming and watching. While traveling, I can still do these, but in a different, more transient way, because I am still always focused on what I will do and see and move on to. Perhaps its because I never travelled where I stayed for a long while. I either moved permanently on purpose (China, Chicago), or I travelled and stayed in one place for a week at most at a time, before going forth to a new destination. While travelling, I can't help but look forward, to keep planning. Only those wonderfully carefree fellows, who don't need to buy bus tickets in advance, to figure out what town they go to next, to see a map or wonder where they will stay that night, only they can travel without moving on already (if only slightly) in their mind. Its difficult to stay fixed in the present, at least for me. That is my fatal flaw at the moment: my drifting off into time, past or future, skipping along so that my feet only graze the present as I fall back to the pavement.
Which comes back to what I said earlier. Expectations. I mean, its hard to travel and not have any expectations. There is some reason, some expectation in our minds of the places we are going, otherwise we wouldn't go there. There is a desire to see some place, if only because we think it would be 'cool'. But, its always difficult to filter through stories and pictures and imagination, and prevent those ideas from becoming expectations and those expectations from becoming disappointments. As a friend told me tonight, expectations create delussions. Everyone's experience of a place and time are unique, clouds of details that will be different and interpreted differently by each person. All I can do is look at the details of my experience, to absorb them, cherish them, and allow myself not to get carried away by the "I haven't done"s or "I should have"s. This is a sort of discipline, I suppose, one I need more practice in.
I have about one week left in this country. My time is already half over. Perhaps I am not seeing the Costa Rica I expected, or wanted. But I am learning, growing, and feeling the details of this time in a new and fascinating (if elusive) way.
This is, as the Costa Ricans say, Pure Life (Pura Vida)!
