Phthursday Musings: Pura Vida

I know, I know, we go a week, two weeks, three weeks, no posts, what gives? And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Phthursday.

This is the one my wife has been waiting for, though!

Two weeks ago, we spent six days and six nights at a resort on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, in the northwest province of Guanacaste.

I had never been to an all-inclusive resort before. I had never even been to a country where English isn’t one of the official languages!

One of the things about all-inclusive resorts is that there’s “free” alcohol available in a lot of place. I put “free” in quotes because the cost of being there tends to assume that you’re downing a bottle of gin daily or something.

Ahh, but I didn’t have any alcohol. I’ve gotten to the point where if I have much to drink, I likely get a headache, especially if I’m spending all day in the sun. So I drink, on average, maybe a beer a month.

So, to, um, get my money’s worth at the bar, I went with the alcohol-free drinks, like the Copacabana, which is allegedly conconut cream, grenadine, lemon juice, orange juice, and pineapple juice, but essentially tasted like a pineapple-leaning drinkable Push-Up.

Here’s where I went looking for pictures of Push-Ups, and I learned that they’re Nestle products now? Also maybe I can make my own Push-Ups??? I COULD HAVE BEEN MAKING MY OWN PUSH-UPS ALL THIS TIME????????????

Anyway that drink was fun, but it was not my main discovery. My main discovery, and the current bane of my existence, because I do not know where to go to definitely get my hands on it, is… tamarindo.

Tamarindo - the juice - is just water and sugar and tamarind, though it seems that to get to the tamarind pulp you might have to boil the seed pods?? Look, I just want tamarindo again. I would have tamarindo everyday. It’s like lemonade but it’s so much better. I mean, I think maybe I can get some sort of tamarindo at a Mexican grocery store, but I don’t know that. I just want someone to help me source some tamarindo, okay?

We took an afternoon catamaran and snorkeling excursion. For me, the snorkeling didn’t go so well… after the fact I got a tip that having facial hair is not a good way to have the mask work well. Alas.

For me, the coolest thing about being on the boat was seeing the sun set over the ocean.

Costa Rica’s economy is largely agricultural. It’s a major exporter of coffee, pineapple, and of course bananas. The fruit at the resort was very good, and in particular you could taste the difference in the pineapple.

One thing there I’d never had before was passion fruit. It was super weird:

The outside of the fruit seemed kind of like a lemon with a thick skin, but inside was this green gelatinous stuff, embedded with crunchy seeds. It tasted fine, but the textures were discordant, and my esteemed travel party was not very interested in trying this delicacy. (Yes, fuzzy in the background, that’s a glass of tamarindo.)

For breakfast every morning, I’d get fruit, a pastry, tamarindo, coffee, and two small tortillas filled with refried black beans, mashed potatoes, sweet plaintains, and scrambled eggs.

I make no apologies for this deliciousness.

This is not too far off from what was my favorite breakfast in Chicago, at the old Harmony Grill before they replaced it. They had a build-your-own-omelet, and I’d get mine with black beans, mushrooms, and basil. Add some hash browns to that, and you’re pretty close to what I was making in Costa Rica.

I find it interesting how stuff like that is difficult to come by in the U.S. There’s huevos rancheros, but, I mean, can’t we all come together and agree that refried black beans are a lot better than refried pinto beans?

I tried to try a lot of things. I didn’t like everything, but there was a lot of good food, and it was better overall than I expected it to be, and not just the fruit. I thought this would be one of the things I wouldn’t like about the trip, and I was very wrong about this.

Here is another thing. On a vacation like this where there was no need to be anywhere at any given time, meals never needed to be rushed, coffee never needed to be downed. On a typical workday, my first coffee coincides with sitting down to work. I don’t know I would attempt to quantify the value of slowing down to eat, but it was very nice.

Costa Rica is, at the present time, the #3 banana exporting country, just ahead of Guatemala, just ahead of Philippines, and way behind #1 Ecuador. I wanted to learn more about what the deal is with Costa Rica before the trip, and I figured bananas were an important part, but I’d never associated Costa Rica with the kinds of problems Honduras and Guatemala had across the 20th century.

To this end I read Banana by Dan Koeppel, a 2007 book about the history of the banana in terms both agronomic and political terms. I also read up a little on Costa Rica history through Wikipedia and through the book Costa Rica: Enchantment of the World, which I had gotten at the library for my goofball kid to read before we left. (The Enchantment series about countries was around when I was a kid and I read a bunch of them that I found in my school library.) I’d never really understood how Costa Rica had managed to avoid all of the crazy shit that had gone down in neighboring countries.

In short, after a civil war in the late 1940s, Costa Rica simply disbanded its military, doubled down on democratic stability, and over time, having not been subject to American coups or brutal infighting, Costa Rica - a country of only about 5,000,000 people - has managed to forge a stable economy based on a mix of tourism and agriculture plus a growing small tech presence. The poverty rate of 25% might sound high, but… the U.S. poverty rate is 18%. (Bet you didn’t realize that. Also, poverty rate is a bit of a confounding measurement. Here’s a page if you want to see numbers and go down that rabbit hole some.)

We didn’t see a lot of the country. The airport outside of Liberia, a couple of towns between the airport and the resort… it felt poor, but not terribly so. The one town we stopped in to eat, Sardinal, just seemed kind of sleepy.

The term they use in Costa Rica is pura vida - “pure life” - and I think the closest translation people might be familiar with is to aloha. It’s a greeting, it’s a farewell, it’s a statement that everything’s alright, and there’s apparently a national sincerity to it.

An all-inclusive resort isn’t really the right place to evaluate the veracity of such a thing, but here’s what I’d say: the people working at the resort seemed to be happier with what they were doing than the people who I see working at your average Courtyard in the U.S. I think, maybe, this is because they had such easy access to tamarindo.

This wasn’t the kind of trip I would have dreamt up. As I noted, I’d never been to such a resort. My typical idea of going somewhere exotic might be going to Paris… the one in Edgar County, Illinois.

I have a lot of difficulty relaxing. It’s a topic I’ve written about multiple times. I can color it a little bit like this: I have a lot of difficulty not constantly writing little lists in my head, coming up with complicated tiny schemes, even plotting out the next six things I’m going to do in the house. Shutting all that off is something which usually requires getting late into the day.

As we got serious about the idea of this trip, I had to convince myself not to let it turn into something where I wanted to explore a lot. In the end it turned out that the resort was remote enough and the road to it was clunky enough that exploring wasn’t all that much of an option anyway, but I didn’t know it was going to be like that. I had to convince myself we were going to spend six days doing almost nothing, maybe going on two little side trips, and that this was okay, that I could handle sitting around doing very little.

You’re probably thinking: Uhhh… what? You had to talk yourself into the idea of sitting around a pool doing nothing? Yes. Yes, I did.

To such end, I was a little frantic about taking care of a lot of little things before leaving on the trip, and about trying very hard to not have to plan anything which might happen after the trip. I knew that after getting home, spring sports season would begin and our schedules would fill up, but I didn’t need to think about that while on vacation, and… I didn’t. It was refreshing, relieving. It was, I think, as close as I could come to pura vida.

Something unexpected has happened to me recently and it goes a bit like this: I know that the political situation we have right now is the worst of my lifetime. But I also recognize how it’s so easy to get eaten alive by it. There aren’t things here I can magically fix. We all have our own small parts to play, now and into the future, to resist, and as the opportunities arise to help rebuild institutions. But we can’t do all of that if we’re in such deep depression or such furious anger. I need to get out there and experience more, to be a better version of me, so as to be in a position to do more for my family, my community, my country. I’m really trying to focus and be less agitated. I haven’t gone the path of taking up meditation, but I’m not averse to it like I may have been in the past. I plan on being a healthy, positive role model for many decades to come, and that means I need to take care of myself in more ways than one.

All of that is a long way of saying: Look guys, I could really use some help sourcing tamarindo here in northeastern Illinois. Anyone? Please?

One side thing we did, which was located adjacent to the resort, was go to an animal sanctuary. Costa Rica is such a biodiverse place that over 4 percent of all known plant and animal species can be found there. It is also a forward thinking country ecologically - there are a lot of things Americans could learn.

The star of the sanctuary is Lucy, a rescued two-toed sloth, but I couldn’t get a good picture of her, so here’s a toucan and a frog:

Outside the sanctuary, we saw a magpie jay, brown pelicans diving into the ocean after fish, and from the boat we even saw the fins of stingrays above the water. All of these pictures are pretty fuzzy, but… that’s okay. Not everything needs to be pristinely digitally captured.

Of equal interest to me was the diversity of the clientele at the resort. I figured it would probably be mostly Americans, but I heard several people speaking French, there were a lot of Canadians around (nothing very subtle about a huge maple leaf tattoo), and a whole lot of Spanish speakers, at least a fair number of which were from Mexico. Although we live in a neighborhood which is kind of diverse, the diversity of the clientele at the resort was very different from most places I’ve been. It might seem like an odd way to put it, but there’s something enlightening and refreshing about being around people of relative affluence, and seeing that affluence spread across a lot of different colors and languages and nationalities. Understanding it intellectually is one thing, but I’m not used to seeing it like that.

In advance of the trip, we decided to get a family plan on Duolingo, and commit to Spanish learning, mostly with an eye of being able to say some basic things while in Costa Rica. You know: agua, por favor, gracias, dónde está el baño, puedo tener más tamarindo, stuff like that.

The boy around here is in a Spanish dual language program, so I figure he probably knows some Spanish, though it can be hard to tell. I mean, I think he actually can speak some, just not around us, because he can’t code switch like that in the house. The lady around here, being a dietitian and having had Spanish-speaking patients over time, has picked up quite a bit, especially as regards food. And I learned a little Spanish in grade school (we had it every Friday for five years), and I took four years in high school (but the less said about that the better). So we weren’t all totally ignorant going in, but, nobody’s exactly going to accuse us of having grown up in San Jose (except maybe the one in Mason County, Illinois… the one they pronounce “San Joe’s”).

When the boy was a baby and kept regular irregular hours, I would actually do Duolingo, and as the stories have it, I would drive the mother insane because I would be rocking the baby while loudly saying things like YO VOY A LA VENTANA. Duolingo has changed a bit over the years, and I know it ain’t quite the bee’s knees, but I always liked it, and I thought it neat to try and get back into a little language learning.

We all did really well maintaining streaks going into the trip, and at different times while in Costa Rica we all said little things in Spanish, like agua, por favor, which was totally unnecessary because everyone we encountered would just respond in English. But we’ve largely kept with it after the trip as well, which I think is cool.

I of course have taken it to an extreme and try to do a half hour every day, instead of just doing one lesson a day. I find that a lot of what I learned even way back in grade school is coming back to me. I may be badly misremembering all this but honestly, I think that right behind math, Spanish was my favorite subject in grade school, and I really wish I would have learned it properly in high school and beyond. And, well, guess what, I still can, and maybe I just will.

Much of our time was spent in and around a couple of pools, or down on the beach. I never do this. I have a weird relationship with the water. I like swimming, but loitering in or around the pool, that’s not my preferred way of passing time.

I understand the appeal much more after this trip. There’s something about being there multiple days, intentionally having nowhere else to go, pointedly avoiding trying to achieve or accomplish anything above and beyond R&R, which brought me some positive perspective about it all.

My spouse had no need to gain any such perspective. She keeps telling people I made her come back, and she’s not serious, but, yeah, she kind of is. She’d happily still be there. I think after a second week I’d have gone mad, but she’d have just barely settled in!

It’s a strange way of phrasing it, but I feel like spending a week in Costa Rica is going to help me feel more present in the various things I do at home this spring. I’m back coaching, I’ve got a couple concerts lined up, I’ve got a couple baseball and soccer games lined up, and overall I’m just really keen about soaking up the world, wherever it might take me, and wherever I might take it. Along the lines of what I wrote a little further up, I feel almost a defiance about it all. I am not going to let those bastards hold me down. We need to live our lives, while recognizing that part of living our lives is being good to one another, and when appropriate, speaking up and speaking out. I might not get the balance exactly right, but I’m going to try, and I’m not going to beat myself up along the way, because that’s a surefire way to get the balance wrong.

The reality is that we can bring pura vida back from Costa Rica to where we are. This is Earth, we are humans, nothing is ever going to be perfect, there are going to be challenges and illness and things that break and that’s part of the bargain. But it’s a beautiful goddamn world full of beautiful goddamn people and we should live our lives like the planet matters and our neighbors matter and our families matter and we matter and we should splendor in all of the riches that this crazy world provides. That, I think, is the true essence of pura vida, and I hope you’ll all join me in embracing it.

Also, please, please, could someone please help me find some tamarindo?