"son cuarenta bolsas,"

she said, as she handed me a stack of green plastic.  

"oh," i said. "le devuelvo las que sobran."

i didn't think we'd need 40 bags.  there were only four of us that were definitely going, a pack of gringos so disgusted by the piles of plastic trash on the beaches near town that we'd decided to grab some garbage bags and spend a couple of hours making a little dent. the trash comes from all over costa rica and lands on this beach on the inside of the very tip of the nicoya peninsula. hurricane alma, that passed over nicaragua and costa rica a month ago, exacerbated the situation and the beaches are covered in a colorful mosaic of the world's refuse.

the owner of the sano banano ("healthy banana," hee) restaurant was excited when we told her we were doing a cleanup and promised us bags and the use of her truck to take it out. aaron, from b.c., olga, from spain and living in juneau, blake, from hawaii, and myself walked to the beach at noon.

thousands of broken flip-flops, no two alike. doll heads, coke bottles, syringes, several hundred combs. razor handles. toys. motor oil containers, pesticide sprayers, one perfect plastic diver. the grand majority was just trozos de plastico, jagged scraps of unidentifiable plastic that were so mixed in with beach debris that just sucking up the entire contents of the beach would have made more sense. 

in the northern pacific, where the currents meet, is an island of floating plastic twice the size of texas. it just spins there, growing slowly.

along the way a few locals stopped to help. a few more, actually, gave us strange looks bordering on hostile. weird. we were three quarters of the way down the beach when three swimsuited americans walked by. "i was just talking about this!" crowed the man. "we were talking about organizing a cleanup next week. do you have extra bags?"  

seven strong now, the cleaning and conversation ebbed and flowed.  two of the newcomers, ethan and danielle, were students at the audubon expedition institute, an environmental education grad program at lesley university whose students spend four semesters living out of a bus, spending each semester in a different area of the u.s. and learning about ecological and regional education.  blake teaches music, art and spanish at the voyager school, a public k-8 charter in kailua.  teacher talk poured out of everyone and i was struck again by how cool energetic young educators are. 

we took 40 bags of trash off of that beach. after 5 hours of bending, carrying those 50-pound sacks up to the road was ridiculously hard. i put the bags on my head to keep my back straight.

one ton of trash. it was the best day yet. and i never want to buy anything plastic again.

my new coworkers

are the cast of a sitcom.

andy, who goes by "fifiu" here (fifiu! being the sound of a little whistle, like to call a dog) told me that as a ten year old kid in LA he was the center of attention at a family reunion when he announced his three life goals: never to get married, to make $100,000 a year at least once, and retire at 35. his family laughed. "live a little, kid. enjoy your childhood." on his 35th birthday he remembered that reunion and evaluated his life. not married-- check. $100,000 a year? more than that, almost continously since beginning work. check. he retired from cingular wireless and came to costa rica on a whim with no spanish and no plan. he fell into this hippie hostel the day the completed a new room. they asked him what to name it and he didn't know any spanish so he tried to get out of being on the spot by calling the dog. they named the room fifiu! and he lived in it for a year. he's been here five years. he writes a lot, long theories influenced by pounds of marijuana, and talks very seriously about the beauty of having no goals. he seems quite happy. his hair is long, but he shaves his face. i find this odd.

reyna is from nicaragua. she is anywhere from 17 to 25 and about four and a half feet tall. she eats everything in sight, trying desperately to get fat so her parents will let her stay here. every time she goes home, she says, her uncle says that costa rica makes her skinny and ugly. she's afraid that he will keep her home next time-- he made her quit her university classes in computer science because the first semester was intensive english (to be able to read the computer science texts) and he had sent her to school for computation, not english! i'm teaching her english when i remember to.

johnny (pronounced yonny) used to be the chief of police. he must be ignoring fifiu's illegal status. he has five kids "with three different women." i must have put on a shocked face because he rushed to assure me that his father had "had 8 women" and only married his mother at 55, after 30 years together. "of the ones that i know, there are 35 of us," he said. i didn't understand for a moment.
"wait, 35 kids? brothers and sisters?!" he shrugged. "as far as i know."
johnny has 34 siblings. 34. he also, unsurprisingly, has a passel of grandchildren. one of his daughters was married at 15 to a 30 year old man. he said he has hope for the last one, a beautiful 13-year-old who comes by all the time with her flea-ridden little pup, making eyes at all the abercrombie-clad college boys. hope he's got a good plan for her.

i won't be here much longer. lastima.

well,

that didn't take long. i'm working here until i decide to leave. my job consists of reading or playing the guitar for a few hours in the morning, waiting for guests to show up. sometimes i have to pour a cup of coffee or make change for someone. for this work i get to eat, sleep, shower, and wash my clothes for free... it works for me, i work for them.

a couple of nights ago i made a fire on the beach with some other travelers i'd met in the hostel. i was talking to a guy in the center of town, a youngish costa rican guy traveling with some others, making hemp jewelry and generally fitting the stereotype of young jewelry sellers all over the world. i invited him and his buddy to join us at the fire later. he showed with his friend, they sat, we chatted. whatever.

last night he shows up at the hostel and after hanging out for a while, playing the drums, he asked me to tell him what i thought of him. i shrugged and made some stuff up-- you like music, you like to tell jokes, you have a big family? i didn't really understand the context. "y quieres saber mi opinion de ti?" he asked me. "um, sure," i said.

he lit into me. "you are the typical united states girl, full of shit, that wants to learn spanish. you invited me to your fire the other night, you didn't give me a drink, you sat down next to my friend instead of next to me. your friends didn't talk to me at all. i spent some time in new york and i know that you all think us latinos are poor suckers, without money or anything. we're not exotic, we're just pieces of garbage."

i'm not good at brushing things off. in hindsight this conversation was hasty and mean but it still made me feel really sick to my stomach in the moment, as he continued to call me silly and racist and whatever else came to mind.

it made me remember some experiences in chile. party etiquette, first off. everyone has a drink, everyone has someone to talk to, and you are responsible for the happiness of those you invite. on that front, i DID screw up.

mostly folks in chile didn't bother me about bush or racism. but i do remember teachers and students asking me tricky questions about american history or policy ("who was kennedy's secretary of state?") and then laughing and calling me stupid, "you don't even know your OWN history!"

80% of costa rica's coastal property is owned by foreigners. americans have turned various communities into retirement villas, where you can get starbucks and mcdonald's from english speaking cashiers and hotels proudly proclaim "no tic@s on staff here!" i imagine that a lot of people feel pushed out of their own door by the flood of rich foreigners, who experience the hawaii-like climate with the central american prices and feel that the next logical step is to buy a retirement home.

there's never anything to say when someone lights into you like that. "that's not true" is impotent. "you're a jerk" doesn't help. i left, eyes smarting. i was angry. it took a while to calm down.

they weren't

pulling my leg about the toad. "don't touch it, it is killer."

i jumped off three rocks yesterday. the first one was about 8 feet high and gave me pause. the second was 12 feet or so and scared me to death. the third was maybe 40 feet. i am proud of myself. but i still have water in my ears.

montezuma

is without revenge, for the moment. i feel a bit more on my feet, my spanish sounds less tense, and i've remembered how to function paying for things in the thousands. i came here because it was one of three places i remembered from my trip here at sixteen-- what was i, so suffused with hormones and eye-rolling that i paid zero attention to anything else? probably.

it's a full-on tourist paradise but less crowded than the major surf beaches. things are expensive but i get some stuff from the grocery and survive on fruit juice for the most part. the water doesn't seem to be a problem.

this place has gems. the libreria topsy (??) is a little bookshop run by a couple of rabid english book-eaters and a little canadian dyke who seems to have just landed there. they guard their english volumes carefully and run a book rental service, $2 and a desposit to rent a book til you finish it. i checked out a canadian book (grin.). i got a four-dollar credit for tom wolfe's a man in full, far more than it was worth to me. that man is so racist. it's amazing that his books have the cachet they do, and he just gets away with his white-suited weirdness.

miguel/michele runs the libre universidad de montezuma, or montezuma free university, where he'll trade you a bedroom for doing some kind of art project. one bedroom has been turned into a concrete cave, complete with stalactites and a giant dead tree mounted in the middle, by one enterprisin tourist who took the challenge to heart. michele is an itinerate drunk with a stringy gray mullet and watery blue eyes. half sicilian and half cuban, he spends each and every day drumming, drinking, and mumbling in four languages. i got my bedroom for a surname, a dollar, a song, and a trip to the grocery store to buy him unfiltered camels; he saw my last name and started gesticulating wildly in italian. when i explained that i neither spoke italian nor knew a thing about sicily, his response was to gift me with a large, heavy yellow book in the language. sigh.

i was surprised last night when, on the terraza, a toad the size of a canteloupe hopped into a dish on the floor and began eating some weird mash. apparently this toad comes every night and the dogs leave it alone. her name is mafalda, not for the argentine comic strip, but "because that is her name."

spent the night in true vacation fashion-- bonfire, full moon, guitar, drunkenness. my commuting calluses are falling off my hands. i have one mosquito bite and probably a DEET-related neurological condition. you can't have your cake and DEET it too.


we shall see tonight if they were pulling my leg about the toad.

day two

was a travel day.  two chicken buses and a ferry. not bad, all told. 

lucia and ty, 10 and 7, were finishing their year here with mom and dad.  lucia was precocious, in that way that means, "talkative and a little snotty."  very cute. we shared green mango and salt on the bus as she sighed an american sigh about how the park folk at manuel antonio wouldn't give them the resident price because they were white. "i mean, they wouldn't believe that we were costa rican," she moaned. hee.  she told me she missed snow. i sympathized.

travel is in the details.  like the detail of what steals your food when you're having a picnic or eating on a patio.  i spent the morning feeding sugar packets to some kind of crested paradise bird.  i am the most terrible tourist ever, i know. but i mean, geez. doing this, i met ain, a 40-something woman from argentina who had left her four kids in buenos aires and moved to puerto viejo with her boyfriend to start some kind of chinese medicine "project."  she talked my ear off about reiki and lost love (the boyfriend is still in puerto viejo, because, "the energy here, it's just so intense, you know?") and then said she was on her way back. i said, "well, at least you'll be able to see your kids!"  she shrugged. "eh, lo que sea."  

what does the day hold? perhaps a waterfall?  no kayaks here on the peninsula, sorry. time to kick back and be a hippie.

i might add

that these may be infrequent or non-existent depending on the actual access to internet. this is an unnecessary addition.

the trip begins

as it almost always begins, with the Ugly American. jennifer and vanessa got a little too drunk on the plane and embarrassed even their meathead boyfriends with their antics.

"i am so pissed OFF at this lady in front of me right now," vanessa whined. "and i mean, of course she´s speaking SPANISH and i can´t tell her to move her ASS and let me off the FUCKING plane."

jennifer laughed, swaying in her seat. "i KNOW. dammit, this is stupid. i am, like, IRATE right now." their matching platinum blonde pigtails bobbed as their short-shorts rode further up their tan butts.

"is this backpack made for a three-year-old?" asked one of the meatheads as he struggled to wear a tiny pink bag.

"just shut UP and CARRY it," giggled one of them. "i´m too hot and IRATE to worry about it."


enough about them. i´m in a hostel in san jose right now called hostal pangaea. it´s a funky party hostel in a nice neighborhood, but all i´ve done so far is sleep. it was a long trip, involving two city layovers, a night in north hollywood, a new friend, and the new backscatter machine at the LA airport. brand name? rapiscan. i´m sure the company heard "RAP-i-scan" but it´s not a far stretch to "RAPE-i-scan" when you see the handily posted image of exactly how much of your naughty bits can be seen by the TSA when you walk through there. a lot of them, that´s all i need to say.

i´m off. did i mention that i managed to get myself sunburned before i even got here?

--pura vida!