Viva la Vida

The extent to which I love a good bus ride here is ridiculous. When we get on, and everyone is groaning about the fact that we will be immobilized in a chair for the next four hours, I am smiling with anticipation to relax and just spend endless hours with my eyes on the scenery and my ears towards my friends, or the movies playing in the background, or an album on my ipod. I can take in Costa Rica, and considering at this point we have driven all over, I would dare to claim that I have at least laid my eyes on a great portion of Costa Rica. These drives are honestly magical. My view will be obscured by bushes and trees and all of a sudden they'll open up to some spectacular landscape of rolling mountains filled with endless greenery and the occasional quaint home. Otherwise, if we're simply in the middle of the city, mountains are visible on all sides of us as a general rule, mountains caressed by clouds and a gradient of green.

And then there's Heredia, our humble home away from home. In Heredia, you can be taught about Costa Rica in general. Like how cars have the right of way here instead of pedestrians, and that these drivers are maniacs, but there's not a crash or accident to be seen. They are safe in their danger. You are taught about the general Costa Rican way of life, of “Pura vida!”, or “Pure life!” It means, it's all okay, life is good. It's used to accept an apology, as a goodbye, as a hello, as a reminder, that indeed, life is good if you let it be. And this is indeed the personality of the locals here. Its not exactly like Mexico, where everything is relaxed and laid back, its more of an environment where everything is happy, and everything is and always will be okay.

On my walk to school, I follow along a railroad track, often being forced to walk on it since there isn't always a place to walk next to it. There's no bar that comes down when the train comes. There's a couple red lights that might light up if you catch them at the right time if a train is coming, but they're awkwardly placed, and the people who need to see them in the moment and do is few. What alerts you to the train is the honking. When approaching an intersection, the train will endlessly blow its horn to tell cars to either cross the tracks or finally hit reverse. But if they don't do so in time, it's not a big deal. The train slows down, and I've even seen the train stop as it waited for a car to move.

Walking the streets, little things even like the pedestrian walk signals are interesting. Instead of a simple hand for stop and a person for walk, the person actually walks. The pedestrian lights here are animated of a person walking or jogging. And the street performers. They perform in the streets. Literally. They will walk out on to the road where the cars are stopped in front of a spotlight and perform while they wait for the light to turn green. Timing their performance so they have enough time to collect money just before the stoplight turns green. I've seen it all, unicycles, tricks with sticks of fire, it's like a circus on a quaint little intersection.

Walking to school at a certain time of day, the aroma of that which is Costa Rica is so sweet. Walking along the railroad tracks, tracks that criss-cross Costa Rica and link it together, the landscape opens up before you, mountains and valleys are spread out before you, beckoning you to explore, beckoning you to stay a while and enjoy it.

There were murmurs, murmurs between my host father and the woman organizing karaoke. Something about “El Primer Millón,” the song I jokingly said I would sing. I didn't pay much attention to it through, our family was going crazy with the karaoke, almost monopolizing the microphone as all of our cousins, parents, brothers, and sisters took their turn. Suddenly, however, the microphone was passed to me as I was introduced as singing “El Primer Millón” to the surrounding observers at the club we were at. As I pulled Mariela towards me to help me out, the song begun and we fought our way through the rest of the song, trying to push the microphone towards each other instead of ourselves, laughing into the microphone as we saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was like the blind leading the blind, I'm not perfectly fluent with Spanish, and this was a relatively fast song, and Mariela didn't know how the song went. Somehow, it worked out though.

At the beginning of our stay in Heredia, our family had played with the idea of taking Julia and me out dancing with the family. As our stay began to draw to a close, I brought it up again with my family. We hadn't been able to go before because we were always gone for the weekends, but having this past Friday free, we decided it was the perfect opportunity to go. So we gathered together our family for the night and asked Olivia for permission, who, knowing she really shouldn't, told us we could go as long as we got back by eleven (which of course we wouldn't) and as long as she could come along as well to supervise (and dance).

We drove far into the mountains to reach our destination, and when we finally got to the club, we could see the city of Heredia and San José glittering behind us. Somewhere on a mountain in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, we found ourselves at our final stop. Magali and Jamie joined our family for the fun, as well as Grace and her roommate: girls I'm not really familiar with.

After our new experiences with the children's museum, we finally went to our first traditional museum – El Museo Nacional. The museum began with a walk through a butterfly room. Though it wasn't as impressive as the one in the InBioParque, it was still beautiful. In the InBioParque, there were a lot of butterflies in a very small amount of space. Here, there was a large amount of space which was tastefully covered with vegetation and a relatively small amount of butterflies, which made encountering one that much more special.

As we moved through the museum, there were various artifacts from Costa Rican history and their descriptions, classic museum design. Apparently, throughout Costa Rica, round balls of cement like material have been found in all different sizes, ranging from being the size of me to being small enough for me to pick up without exerting too much effort. They have yet to definitively figure out the purpose of these balls. There are many theories that fly around. One suggests that they were just for decoration. Other theories suggest that they were used as a method of keeping track of time and date, which was important for growing crops and keeping track of the rainy seasons and such. Often they were found arranged in lines to make angles or other formations.

Once we got to the basement of the museum, the style changed. In the basement was various rooms that the army of Costa Rica used (back when they still had an army). Though I don't remember for sure, apparently the building used to be some sort of headquarters for the leader of Costa Rica, and the army stayed in the basement. There was a hallway with small rooms stemming off. There wasn't a door covering them and the graffiti on the walls was the original graffiti from the soldiers who stayed there. These rooms were used for people they held hostage or for soldiers that needed to be punished. They would only have a wooden box for a bed and few other luxuries. Another room contained the bathrooms of the army men, which at some point were built over to display more artifacts in a museum that owned the building before El Museo Nacional. Another room involved the cafeteria and another the showers. Just a walk back through the butterfly room and a step over a couple of the famous balls and we were off to school for the day.

When I received my information about who my family was going to be, I was told I would have a host mother, father, brother, and two sisters. My actual family, however, is bigger than this. They forgot to mention another brother and another sister. These siblings popped up because of their association with my immediate siblings. The extra brother is the boyfriend of Mariela, my 18-year-old sister, and the extra sister is the girlfriend of Eric, my 17-year-old brother. Over the weekend, they spent most of their time at our house.

Surprisingly, there wasn't that sort of awkward dynamic between the parents and the boyfriend/girlfriend of my siblings. They were treated exactly as family. It was Eric's girlfriend's job to wash down the place mats we used for dinner every day she was here. The parents would ask the boyfriend/girlfriend to go retrieve something from the house and they would know exactly where it was. They would sit at the dinner table with us and help set the table, and were just in general completely integrated into the family.

When we are just all spending time together, they sit on the couch with us and watch television, or just talk to everyone. I don't know how long these relationships have actually been going on, but there just seems to be a much smoother integration into the family which is a bit of a contrast I feel to the United States. Though a relationship may be supported in the U.S. by the family, and the family may approve, there's never fully a sense of “He/She is part of our family,” which is very apparent here.