Bienvenidos
An Introduction to Land and Culture in Costa Rica
I left sitting in the airport waiting for a flight to sitting on an airplane waiting for arrival to standing in a line waiting for customs and baggage.
The line was long, and every time I turned a corner expecting it to be done, it just got longer.
I didn’t care too much though, just happy to be in Costa Rica and looking forward to the beautiful sights. As soon as we had broken through the clouds coming in, the landscape of the country, with its mountains and farms and rivers, had been revealed.
Our flight had been delayed at Hartsfield-Jackson for two hours due to maintenance and a switched gate. As soon as I had sat down in my seat, we were told to get off. Shortly after, we were directed to a terminal on the other side of the airport. It was my first time flying out of the country, so I was nervous from the last minute changes, but excited. We would be doing travel writing on the University of Georgia’s Costa Rica campus for a week, alongside a smaller group of forestry students studying tropical reforestation.
The first two people I had met had been John Braucher, a junior splitting his studies between English and cellular biology, and Marygrace Hulett, a sophomore in the midst of switching from English to art.
Both were from Athens, but had never met. John had attended Athens Academy, a private high school; Marygrace, the public Cedar Shoals. He had brought a Bible while she had a copy of Justine.
Walking through the hallways of our destination airport, it seemed the ordeal in Atlanta had thrown the Juan Santamaria International Airport into disarray as well. Airport employees buzzed about and stressed as managers barked orders in Spanish.
An employee ordered us in English to get against the wall. Then, in Spanish, she told everyone that they could go to a different line if they were a Costa Rican citizen.
An older white woman raised her voice. Everyone turned to listen in.
“What?” she asked. “What are you saying? How do you expect us to understand you?”
The employee looked at her, confused.
“Are you a Costa Rican?” she asked the woman.
“Oh, no.”
“Then stand against the wall.”
The woman turned red, her family visibly embarrassed. A few people laughed quietly. Why the hell would she go abroad with that kind of attitude, I wondered.
We were herded into a central waiting area with a daunting maze waiting before check in. Time turned to a slow shuffle of bodies and suitcases.
The airport seemed overloaded. Our plane had not just been full but also overbooked, and Delta management had kept offering ticket vouchers of increasing value. The last offer I heard was $1,500 to take a flight that left for San Jose at 5:59 p.m. I was tempted, but that meant a separate cab ride up the mountain.
The line picked up speed, and soon enough, we were outside on a bright day in the capital, amidst a sea of taxi drivers, signs, and families.
Orrin Swayze, a junior English and mass media arts major from Atlanta, was in the middle of everything. He was holding a sign that read “Bienvenidos” and some daisies for his girlfriend, who had also been delayed on our flight.
Our group caught up and exchanged travel stories. One girl on another trip had already had her passport stolen, a couple from our own had missed their flights, and Orrin had actually been waiting alone in San Jose for hours. He had flow on United, and his flight beat our tardy one easy, even with a stop in Houston.
Luckily, a steady stream of taxi drivers had kept him company.
“Taxi, taxi, taxi,” they asked him. “No, no, no,” he had to keep telling them.
He also had encountered his own maintenance problems en route. His car had broken down the night before, when he was originally supposed to go to Atlanta, evidently still possessing the problem he had paid $400 to fix. He hastily called friends to see if anyone could loan a car over spring break, but his friend Patrick managed to one up him, saying that he was planning to drive to the airport for a flight at a similar time.
The bus would be a while, we were told, so we went back to waiting, only this time in beautiful, warm weather and with a busy city swirling around us.
Meanwhile, Jordan Elliott was back in Atlanta, waiting at a terminal for a 5:59 flight. She would not be getting the voucher Delta had hawked to us.
She arrived two hours early for the same 9:45 flight I had been on, but found herself blocked when she tried to print her pass. She was promptly ushered into an airport spanning line.
At the end, she was directed to the help line, where she was told it was too late for her flight. Not because of her timing, but because they had given her seat to someone else on the overbooked flight.
She rushed through the TSA, hoping for a standby seat on the delayed flight. She made the desk right as they gave the last seat on the flight to someone else.
A Delta employee, ever helpful in the worst ways, told her to sprint again to another gate. Once again, someone else got the last standby seat.
Management told her she might have a shot at a seat on the 5:59 flight. However, nothing was guaranteed, and she wouldn’t know for sure if she had a spot until five minutes before the plane departed. She settled down at the gate, the first one there.
After about twenty minutes of standing outside the airport, I went for some food at a nearby restaurant. The place was busy, brimming with tourists and Costa Ricans alike, and two women worked frantically behind the counter. The massive line from the airport had come out hungry.
Waiting in line, I practiced how to properly pronounce the foods in Spanish. When it came to my turn, I froze.
I had forgotten how to say “I would like” in Spanish. Gustaria. The overworked server just stared at me, confused, and so I said rice, beans, and muttered a mangled “plaintanos” beneath my breath. I pointed and she got what I meant.
The food was filling and warm, but the bus arrived shortly after I sat down. I fumbled around and asked the cashier for to-go boxes in English. While she picked up on what I wanted, the language barrier no doubt made her life even more stressful as a line of tourists mounted.
I had meant to brush up on my Spanish before the trip, but had only really worked on it sparingly. That was a poor decision.
While I hadn’t embarrassed myself back in the airport like that woman, I instead went outside to represent my country poorly in the city. I jumped onto the bus and tried prepare some phrases to use next time we stopped.
We went through beautiful gulf towns for three hours. Soon enough, we were up the mountains. There were dense, dark forests on each visible side, brimming with life.
As we ascended, the road grew rough and the bus jolted back and forth. However, the motion became a pleasant rocking, and that combined with the waning sun made most of us fall asleep, some people nodding off on a seat partner’s shoulder.
I fell asleep for twenty minutes and only dreamt of two things: menial work at my job back in Athens, and cooking pasta, something I eat near constantly back home.
I woke up to the sight of a gold-tinged mountain looming over a misty valley and kicked myself for dreaming of the two most banal things possible in such a beautiful place.
However, I realized that while these sights would be beautiful, it would be the culture that really changed how I thought. Though I was suddenly aware that I would not be able to truly understand Costa Rica without the language, I made a point to move slower and ask more questions with what I had.
We got to campus about 6:45. It was pitch black and raining. The first thing I noticed about the campus was the sturdy wood that almost everything seemed to be made out. One of the naturalists, a Cambridge grad named Theodora, explained that the wood absorbed carbon dioxide emissions, part of a wide spanning carbon offset program present in many aspects of the campus, from the wood to a biodigestor to reforestation.
We ate a dinner of rice, beans, and meat, all steaming hot and filling. There were 14 of us, spanning different majors, backgrounds, and ages. There was Vesselina Kotzeva, a senior English education major born in Pazardjik, Bulgaria, and Jaydin Leslie, a freshman business major from Gainesville, Florida. There was Kyle Mercer, a sophomore computer science major from Marietta, Georgia, and our professor, Spenser Simrill, the son of a preacher who taught creative writing and American lit back in Georgia.
I borrowed Orrin’s headlamp to make my way back to the bungalows that night, and noticed the immense darkness of the area. There were no external lights so as to not disturb the wildlife. I heard a solid wall of noises from the forest, so the lighting decision appeared to be doing its job.
It also made the stars pop out from their black backdrop more so than in Athens, reminding me of trips to rural Georgia with my father when I was young. While this area was considerably higher up than the flat pastures and farms we would visit, the illuminated night sky looked similar when the clouds made their way out.
Our rooms matched the sustainable design, with a tall, open roof that kept the bathroom cool and passive heating. I was incredibly grateful to the biodigestor that let us flush toilet paper.
The beds were a bit hard, but we passed out quick around 9:30 p.m. The winds howled outside, but oddly enough, it came to sound comforting.
For Jordan, the winds rattled her taxi as it ascended the mountain. Her driver, a short, stocky local, was pleasant and talkative, but drove fast and recklessly. His driving demeanor combined with the mountain gusts made her realize that one turn too strong, and they were off the cliff.
Earlier, he had made fun of American taxi drivers for taking things slow.
“Drivers there, they look this way, and they look that way, and then they say, ‘No, you go first,’” he said while cutting across double lines.
Either way, she had made it, and Delta had been proven wrong. After waiting for hours at the gate, she was given a seat on the flight, but the attendants checked her passport and told her they couldn’t let her on due to its looming expiration date.
The Costa Rican officers would let her through, Jordan insisted, showing a screenshot of the customs website that declared a passport valid through length of stay. The employees argued, but let her on, gravely warning that she would just be sent on an opposite flight.
When she arrived, the Costa Ricans let her through. Coming out to a dark night in San Jose, she arranged a cab for the four hour drive.
“I was relieved,” she told me the day after. “Excited, but mostly relieved.”
Jordan arrived to the campus at midnight and went straight to the guard house. She was told they would be expecting her. They were not.
The guard walked her to the bungalows and shined his flashlight in every room. If the room looked like it had a bed empty, he would unlock the door. His choices wound up mostly being the boys’ rooms, to his irritation.
Finally, he found Jordan a spot in a girls’ room, where she got ready for bed amidst questions from confused tropical reforestation students.
At 6 a.m. the next day, we all got up, groggy, but fully prepared to see the area and milk a cow.
Respect Earth and life in all its diversity. Earth Charter Principle 1.
(photos/Sydney Clouatre)
