Conversations from Costa Rica (Part 1)

Almost a week home and I finally emerge.
I am so sorry. It’s been an interesting few days. I’ll go into them at a later date. Not now. Right now, I wanted at least begin to spill the contents of my head about the trip to Costa Rica. I am surprised to be writing these words but: I miss it. And I wish I could move there. I just have no idea how to make a living. But if I find a way, like my like uncle likes to say, if you can count, don’t count on me (being here anymore that is)
But while I was there, I became a Chatty Cathy.
So I was chatty. Big deal. Actually it was a big deal. I found myself doing the reporter thing a lot because I desperately wanted to absorb as much as I could about the people I was spending time with.
I talked with the cabbies, I talked with our tour guide. I chatted with the young salesman who sold me the coconuts. And I asked lots of questions of my uncles and relatives. I had questions. And I got some great answers … and some interesting looks. Here‘s the first installment of my conversations of Costa Rica:

Taxi Please!
I did not catch their names and they never caught mine. But that didn’t keep the conversation from flowing.
“There’s not a whole lot to see in the city,” our first cabbie told us. “The museum is the best choice.”
We had approached our cabbie while he was parked in front of the main bus stop in San Jose, Costa’s Rica’s crowded capitol. The cabbie took us on a wild ride, diving between vehicles and through crosswalks. Pedestrians, many of them used to insanity of the traffic, boldly leaned in toward the cars. Their confidence in the driver’s ability to navigate around them was impressive if not well founded.
“There’s a big crime problem,” the cabbie told us. He went on to say, as unsafe as the big city was years ago, it was even worse these days as immigrants from Nicaragua flooded in. Our cabbie was surprisingly diplomatic about the issue. Others I spoke to, were less courteous.
Our diplomatic cabbie told us that many Costa Ricans are unhappy with how the immigrants don’t seem invested in their host country. They throw their trash on the ground, he said. Many are unskilled laborers desperate to survive the global downturn. Problem is that Costa Rica has been hit as bad as the rest of the world. So while some immigrants resort to hawking everything from cell phone accessories to plastic Bic pens for 100 colones (about 20 cents) apiece on the street, others have turned to crime. Jewelry, cameras, cell phones, hang on tight to your belongings or you may never see them again.
The conversation took on a lighter tone on our ride back to the bus station (after a very pleasant visit at Costa Rica’s Museo Nacional)
We hailed another cabbie, or rather stopped him, as he was leaving after dropping off people who were obviously tourists. One of them wore a college baseball cap. They left one of the cab’s back doors open. I ran to stop him.
“Well now that you’ve stopped would you take us to the Coca Cola bus stop?”
Oddly he seemed somewhat reluctant but then he said “sure.”
He told me he had picked up the group just before us at Pavas.
“What’s in Pavas?” I asked.
“Oh, lots of things,” he said. Bill and I were missing out apparently. There was lots of shopping and the national stadium where they worship soccer I suppose. Why those tourists came to San Jose, God only knows. I guess everyone is curious about the capitol, he said. He encounters a lot of tourists, he said. They jump in and, to his relief, at least speak in short choppy sentences. Or they may show him a brochure of a hotel where they are staying and give him the “take me there” hand gesture.
Good thing for a man who’s most practiced English phrase it “No speak-a Inglish.”
Sometimes when communication becomes impossible, he pulls out his cell phone, calls a friend who can speak English, and has him translate over the phone. It’s worked so far but for one time. In weird incident, he said a black man and a white woman shoved their suitcases in the trunk, jumped in the cab, then tried to tell him where they wanted to go. But neither spoke a word of Spanish and neither could make clear where they wanted to go.
The cabbie did what he usually does, pulled out the cell and tried to call his English speaking friend. As he did, the duo suddenly jumped out, and tried to hightail it out of there.
“I barely had time to get their suitcases out of my car before they took off,” he said. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he may have been lucky to survive that day.
When the riders are non-English or non-Spanish speakers, then they are all screwed, he said.
“I get them where they want to go, but other than knowing they’re human, I have no idea who I have in the cab,” he said.
Stay tuned. More fun conversations from Costa Rica to come.
GT.