Let The Rain...

The nerves are gone, but I still can't help but feeling a little bit sad to be away from home. My flight went well, I was lucky and sat next to an incredible lady from El Salvador. She was dressed in traditional indigenous clothing and was wearing a beautiful wreath of blue beaded necklaces. One of her eyes was glazed and clouded over with blindness and her other was a deep brown, full of sadness. She held her fragile hands curled tight in her lap in anticipation of take-off and I noticed tears welling in her eyes….not your typical seat partner. I asked her what was wrong and she went on to tell me about the passing of her father just three days prior. He had died of stomach cancer which had spread to his prostate. We spoke for about an hour and while I couldn’t always understand, her expressions told me all I needed to know. Her life read somewhat like a soap opera - four sons from a sour divorce and a traitor ex-husband who eloped with her niece and then had a bastard child with the wench ex-family member. Imagine that.

I’m learning the system quickly. The currency in Costa Rica is the colón and the exchange rate is approx. 500 colones to one dollar. I felt so rich when the money exchange lady handed me 25,000 big ones, too bad my inflated excitement burst today when I threw down 7,000 on Pantene Pro-V shampoo and conditioner and a tube of toothpaste. San Jose is wild; it’s dirty, grungy, ghetto and fabulous - all at the same time. Pretty difficult to drink it all in at once.

My host is an elderly woman named Doña Mayra and she’s flippin’ cool as all heck. She was the Javelin champion of Central America in the 60’s and was voted the #1 female athlete in ’61. Doña Mayra has countless medals and trophies lining her shelves and newspaper clippings framed on her walls. Her life reads much like soap opera as well – a tumultuous first marriage to a man only in love with her success, a second marriage plagued by a claustrophobic mother-in-law and an only son caught in the middle. Her son, Jonathon, has a new 7 month old baby boy with a beautiful Costa Rican woman named Adriana. I’m going to meet them today.

Ok, I feel as though I need to devote a few moments to describe the rain. It’s unlike anything I have ever experienced. It sounds like the love child of a tenor belting a glass shattering high B flat and a seriously tee’d-off King Kong, fighting against the guy who invented fireworks, in a bar brawl. No joke.


Pura Vida