New Year, Same Juxtaposted Life

A new year is upon us. 2010.

This year, this March, more specifically, I will complete one year in country. It’s hard to believe. Time has passed quicker than the blink of the eye, and has passed slower than molasses. Oftentimes I feel like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, lost in a life that is routine, predictable, planned, and protected. It’s a time warp here, and it’s a bubble, just like Jim Carrey’s. I wonder if this is every Peace Corps Volunteer’s experience. Aside from the occasional glance at the New York Times online when I can get to functional Internet, I have no idea what is going on outside my bubble. I barely heard about the earthquakes in Haiti, I have no idea what Obama is up to these days, nor did I know about the State of the Union until the day before. I feel so ignorant about world news. Instead, I hear when the soccer field opens for the season, I learn my neighbor has a fig tree in her yard, I discover a new fruit, I hear of Raquel getting into college, I learn the first day of school was changed to a week later, I learn Rocio and Mario got new chickens.

Life here is both funny and serious, peculiar yet ordinary, stress-free yet demanding, uncomplicated yet complex, ambiguous yet incredibly clear, spontaneous yet remarkably calculated. It’s a juxtaposed world of duplets I live in.

And the month of January began in very similar fashion, back and forth between my comfortable North American style life and my adopted other, temporary life.

I rang in the New Year on the Pacific coast, asleep in my hotel, The Pelican. I was there for a wedding of the Peace Corps assistant country director, chock full of out-of-town guests thrilled to attend a destination wedding in Costa Rica. Following that I returned back to my site to “work” for a week. Side note: my town is somewhat of a ghost town -a sleepy mountain town, the Yin of the Yin and Yang, and during summer vacation, even more so ghostly. So by “work” I mean stroll to the local corner store, talk with the people, teach an English class, garden, sleep a sufficient 8 hours a night, and spend a lot of alone time.

Then a week later arrived the Yang to my Yin – my parents, and two weeks of traveling and showing them Costa Rica – in luxury, might I add, something I do not know of this country. The trip was without parallel. How do I sum up two weeks of occurrences, comings and goings, escapades, and mishaps in one blog post? Sure, I could regale you with tales of how we almost got a piece of luggage stolen right off the car seat with us in the car, or how freezing cold wind and rain in a funky mountain town of Costa Rica forced us to sleep in our coats and hats, or how we walked hundreds of feet high in the jungle tree tops on hanging bridges, or swam with schools of fish in the mighty Pacific, or how we ate fresh seafood nearly every day, or how we witnessed herds of both White-Faced Capuchin monkeys and Howler monkeys on the prowl for food as wallflowers from our eye-level, villa balcony, or how we traveled over 900 miles on pot-hole covered roads only to find that Toad Hall (“it was written in Lonely Planet”) was permanently closed, or how we learned on our Costa Rican coffee tour that your $4 latte at Starbucks is worth every penny of it, or how we sometimes felt like we were in Germany due to the plethora for German-owned places, or how we got lost almost every day oftentimes finding ourselves in slums or seemingly unsafe areas with our fancy rental car, or how we turned the wrong way down one way roads a time or two, or how I made my parents help teach my English class, or how my parents learned the Pura Vida lifestyle of the Costa Ricans, or how we ate fresh tropical fruit every morning, or how my parents were both simply shocked and humbled by this tiny little country. But then I thought, ‘Naaaaah, that wouldn’t be so interesting for you.’ So instead, I just decided to post some pictures.

Arenal and the hanging bridges:

My front yard in Copey:

Coffee tour in my site!

Breakfast all the time:

Drove so many miles, only to find out it was permanently closed:

Relaxing over the Pacific:

Getting ready to relax in the Pacific:


And so now my parents are back safely in their North American home, and I’m back to my juxtaposed life, back in my bubble, waiting for something interesting to happen. Perhaps the corner food store will put everything on half price tomorrow, or Carlos Andrés will buy a new bicycle. But until that does, I’m just living my simple, humble life, grateful for a new year….waiting, thinking, being.