2 posts tagged “costa rica”
How many places have you lived in your life?
Hooah, it's like this one was made for me.
1976 - oh, 1983 or so: the Barn. Born and raised here, it was an actual barn that my dad rebuilt into a house. it was a pretty awesome job he did, but i went back there after i graduated high school, explained who i was and asked to walk around a little bit. totally wierd, but the homeowners accepted. bad idea. they had it all covered in japanese artwork that while cool totally skewed my memories in irreconcilable ways. not the best idea, trying to go home, sometimes.
1983 - 84 (dates will be very vague for the time being): ferndale lane, haverford, pa. i remember that it had a front yard well shaped for baseball variations, i learned to play hoop down the street, and i'm pretty sure it's where i first saw cable television.
1984 - 1987ish: indiana. first, the kessler boulevard monstrosity of astroturf, mirrored walls, spiral staircases and marble. not to mention a huge lawn, a troublesome pool, a grip of chipmunks and oh, the cold. then geist, which was a nice place with woods in the back and huge vaulted ceilings, where we once had a huge christmas tree. the last house i lived in regularly with papabean for more than a decade and a half.
1988-95: we moved back to haverford. i lived with my grandparents for a while, then pretty close to school for a few years, then to a street i don't remember, where the rents split up. from there i lived with my mom and little brother in various spots for a while, and from sophomore year or so on i lived with my dad and his fiancee. i moved over there because i knew my dad was better positioned to get me a car, not out of any sense of preference for either. neither one made much sense to me at the time.
August 1995 - December 1996: San Antonio, Texas, at Trinity University. An excellent place for people who wanted to go to college to learn what seemed like pretty generic stuff to me at the time and have no interest in fun. That summer, I lived in Newark, New Jersey. Just in case you thought Texas was bad.
January 1997 - June 1999: New London, CT, at Connecticut College. And a good time was had by all. Interspersed by spending the summer of 98 in Austin, Texas. I like Austin, and you would too if you could see past the fact that it's in Texas.
July 1999 - present: The People's Republic of California. In sequential order, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Oakland/SF (the Camp NoJob days), San Diego, Monterey, SF, and back to Monterey. Interspersed by two big ones:
May 2002- March 2003: Costa Rica. I actually only lived there from August-March; I was travelling the rest of the time.
November 2004- June 2005: Bangkok, Thailand. Again, I was travelling around the region for a lot of this.
Anyway, Vox, I don't have time for all these questions.
This is kinda easy.
In May of 2002, I met up with two friends who were five weeks into some international travelling. They had been to Southeast Asia and I met up with them at SFO, from where we would go to Costa Rica and Belize.
Five days into our trip, we were moving from Monteverde, up in the central highlands, to Malpais on the shore. It was one of those long, exhausting days, of buses followed by sprinting for ferries followed by ferries, more buses, and then the which-hotel's-it-gonna-be dance of every new town. we settled in to our room, and went to the beach.
while we were there, some kid used a key to break into our room. I know this because he also did the same to my neighbor, who was asleep in the room at the time. he got everything - my wallet and money belt, including plane tickets, passport, atm and credit cards, license, and about $600 in cash and another $500 in traveller's checks.
But that's not the worst part of the story. When I went to Grupo Taca's office to get my ticket to Belize replaced, I was told I would have to buy another ticket and they would reimburse me -- despite the fact that I had less than $500 available to me at the time and foreseeable future. (Lesson learned -- it is not necessary or advisable to travel with so much cash). Long story short, I broke into a mixture of tears and anger, yelling furiously in Spanish at this poor Tico toeing the company line. I must have gone on for fifteen minutes before I have up. And as I walked out, the one chance to get revenge on them crossed my eyes. I went to their five gallon water cooler, opened up the nozzle, and left. I hope the place flooded. I'm sure it didn't, I'm sure I embarrassed myself, and I'm sure that even though it was the worst, I learned a lot from it. Namely not to be such a fucking sally every time life deals you a moron.
