A Family Affair
Friday morning began the long-awaited, highly-anticipated, much-feared, Family Visit. Yes, that's melodramatic, but it's something akin to what was going through my mind in the days preceding (and a little bit during) their visit. As usual, here comes your chronological summary/analysis of the whole thing. And I mean the whole thing.
Friday
Took the 9:45am bus to San José thinking it would take 45 or so minutes, since I usually seem to slow buses down. Got really angry about 10 minutes into the ride: a man dressed in a hard hat and claiming to be a representative of some government construction group or something hopped on the bus and passed around a can collecting donations to help the victims of recent heavy flooding in Costa Rica. The man was very well-spoken, had a whole speech prepared, and the cause is a worthy one. There's just one problem: two weeks ago this same guy was wearing scrubs, claiming to be a med student and collecting money from three of my classes to buy morphine for terminally ill children. Friday, I gave him extremely dirty looks and the equivalent of US$0.03. I can't believe I caught a con artist! I wanted to shout on the bus and expose him to everyone... but I was so afraid that I was mistaken. Maybe I just really wanted to be mistaken. The bus ended up arriving in San José in less than half an hour, so I sat and steamed about bus-guy until Mike showed up for me to vent to.
Then we walked to Mike's host father Randall's office. Randall works for a travel agency, meaning he could go right into the airport and pick up Mike's family. He drove us to the airport and brought a sign that read "Amstrong," then rather unceremoniously abandoned us outside the airport while he went in to fetch Mike's mother and brother, Nate. This was problematic because we had expected to meet them outside the airport, and also because their name is Armstrong. Somehow, an hour later two non-Spanish speaking Americans emerged with a non-English speaking Costa Rican they did not know and were not expecting. Hugs and people talking over each other; the usual reunion scene mixed with it's-so-good-to-meet-you's. Then we all piled into Randall's car. Even this was interesting: Mike and I had been trying to decide which of the two of us (as the only non-Randall Spanish-speakers) should sit up front with Randall, and then his mom ended up sitting there. I got really nostalgic for our nightmare taxi ride after we arrived in July, and got to be in the interesting position of being the (relatively) calm one watching others experience their first car ride in Costa Rica traffic. Randall was driving OK, but Mike's mom still managed to be possibly the first person ever to apply the phrase "squeeze play" to a driving situation.
Randall dropped us off at the hotel, we checked in and promptly fell in love with Steve the Desk Guy, or Steves as he is more affectionately known. The hotel was roomy, gorgeous, and completely English speaking, which took the pressure off for translating (at least while we were there). The hotel was decorated with an odd mixture of pre-Colombian-style ceramics and goldwork, and colonial-era Spanish Catholic paintings, all right next to each other. It was like witnessing the conflict of colonization happen through artwork. Also, one of the paintings may or may not have been holding Voltron's Blazing Sword (it was either that or a light saber).
We settled in, Mrs. Armstrong told me I was "just the sweetest thing," and we grabbed lunch in the hotel restaurant. At this point, Mike ordered "café con menta" (coffee with mint) but actually said "café con mente" (coffee with mind). We teased him for ordering Coffee with Brains for possibly the whole weekend. After lunch, Mike led us on a walking tour of San José. We walked by a bunch of museums, government buildings, through an artesanía (artisan's market aka Souvenir Alley), through the pedestrian avenue, stopped for coffee at a really neat trendy café that Mike and I have been attempting to try for ages, fruitlessly tried catching a taxi in the rain for about half an hour, and eventually just walked back to the hotel. The highlight of the outing was when we walked through the Cultural Center and caught a glimpse of a youth theatre rehearsal. This basically involved 20 kids making sheep/monkey noises from a distance, sprinting toward us, climbing all over the old molasses processing machinery (the cultural center is an old molasses plant) and counting to 10. It was possibly the coolest random thing I've seen in Costa Rica or anywhere. After all that, we had dinner at the hotel and headed up to Nate and Mrs. Armstrong's room (or The Tower as we called it) for card games, namely Golf and Bohnanza, a ridiculous little game about bean farming that is dirty and addictive. Let me just say that Wikipedia's estimate of 1-hour gameplay is highly inaccurate when you barter as much as we did. After Bohnanza we were all pretty exhausted and headed to bed. Unfortunately, some random German guy decided to go for a 3am dip in "the small pool" (pretty much a fountain and the only pool at the hotel), and apparently this required a lot of shouting.
Saturday
After breakfast we cruised the gift shop and headed to La Paz. The hotel booked a semi-private tour for us, meaning a mini-sardine bus collected us and four others, drove us to La Paz with Spanish and English commentary along the way, and then the driver became our tour guide upon our arrival. La Paz is a really beautiful place about 3 hours from San José and at 6000 ft. elevation. It's pretty touristy, but still pretty gorgeous. First we "hiked" (everything was paved and had handrails) through a bird area, where we saw a bunch of birds and monkeys. The monkeys were very social... I was tempted to play with them. There was also one rather excited blue bird who flew into my right foot. I was standing still. He seemed unphased by it, however. Then we progressed to butterflies (one landed on my shoulder... I get all the love from nature) and hummingbirds. Then a break for lunch and we continued on to see snakes, frogs, cows, and drink agua dulce (warm sugar cane beverage... reminiscent of apple cider but made from molasses). After the animals came the waterfalls. It was raining the whole time were there; we got pretty much soaked and it was great. After all that, we made the nauseating trip back to the hotel... but not before seeing a bunch of raccoons eat some bananas. So, Mike and I each got to see our favorite animals and end the trip on a happy note.
After getting cleaned up, we picked out a restaurant from one of the guidebooks that was 3 blocks away from the hotel. However, it was dark and not safe to walk, so the security guard hailed us a taxi (read: walked into the middle of the street until one stopped). Mike was in charge of this operation and gave the taxi driver the address. Unfortunately, this taxi driver not only had not heard of the restaurant; he did not know which streets were which. Here's the thing: all streets in San Jose are numbered and ordered. It shouldn't be hard. However, any time he was asked anything about street numbers, the taxi would respond: "ay, me with numbers..." So we sort of just drove around in circles over and over again. Mike started getting more and more frustrated, basically subtly insulting the taxi driver by explaining to him how simple this drive should have been. I started giggling and translated for his mom, who also giggled and applauded Mike's assertiveness. So basically we're all sitting in the backseat giggling while Mike has to put up with possibly the second most clueless taxi driver we've ever had driving in circles for half an hour. Eventually he just dropped us off at the hotel again and we paid him $5. Thank goodness taxis are cheap here. We ended up walking a block to a pretty swanky restaurant and had a fantastic dinner. Got back to the hotel late and crashed. German guy must have been tired too, judging by the lack of small-pool-shouting.
Sunday
Everyone was pretty tired, so we decided against any more long-distance excursions (also Nate wanted to have as little of the Costa Rican car ride experience as possible) and instead picked out some local museums. We started off with the Children's Museum, which is basically like a Smithsonian for little kids, covering topics like outer space, nature, the human body, culture, and technology. We were the only adults in the museum unaccompanied by small children, but still managed to be possibly one of the least mature groups there. Points worth mentioning:
- we really felt the lack of Pluto from the solar system
- the museum staff laughed at me for getting startled by one of the displays
- translating signs, even if they are meant for children, is difficult
- when reading a sign that has to do with Don Quixote, if you don't know a word, it probably means "windmill"
- there was a small Prison Museum tucked away inside that was just a bunch of locked doors
- very little of the museum actually made sense
After the Children's Museum, we took a cab to UCR to show Nate and Mrs. Armstrong around the campus. The taxi driver was learning English and spoke to us in random words and phrases for the entire ride. Poor Mike was stuck in the front seat again, while we in the backseat could hear next to nothing. We tooled around campus for a bit, then stopped into a little Italian place called Il Pomodoro (which had a delightful cartoon tomato mascot, you really have no idea). The food was delicious albeit covered in cloves and cloves of garlic. It started to rain after lunch, so catching a taxi to our next destination became difficult yet again. We eventually caught one, all climbed in, went 20 feet and got kicked out of the cab. Apparently the Costa Rican Art Museum was out of that taxi's juresdiction. We caught another taxi (which covered the same exact juresdiction as the last one) which was willing to take us there. The art museum was pretty good, although we kind of paced it weird. Then we decided to try to take a tour of the National Theatre and hoped a taxi over there, but it was closed... so we went to a Pops (Costa Rican ice cream chain) instead. I ordered a bowl of a flavor called Brownie Dynamite, then two seconds later saw a poster for a fantastic-looking Brownie Dynamite sundae that cost exactly the same. Depressing. I'm half-tempted to go to the local Pops right now and get one.
After Pops, we walked back to the hotel, got cleaned up and played another round of Bohnanza, which ended just in time for me to pack up the last of my things and head back to Heredia before it got too late. More hugs and people talking over each other as I said my "goodbye"s and "see you in November"s to Mike's family. I was sorry to say goodbye to them; the weekend went really well and they're really looking forward to me traveling with them again in November.
But as sorry as I was to say goodbye to them, it was not nearly as sorry as I was to say goodbye to Mike... and I'll be seeing him again on Thursday! With every passing weekend, it gets more and more difficult to leave him for another week. Part of that is knowing that every week that goes by brings us that much closer to December and doing the long-distance thing for a while... but part of it is just that he honestly feels like my other half. Leaving him after spending so much time together is very jarring and harsh. I don't like doing it. But at the same time, it's kind of wonderful to feel this way. It's a good thing.
And on that Martha Stewart note, I sign off.
Friday
Took the 9:45am bus to San José thinking it would take 45 or so minutes, since I usually seem to slow buses down. Got really angry about 10 minutes into the ride: a man dressed in a hard hat and claiming to be a representative of some government construction group or something hopped on the bus and passed around a can collecting donations to help the victims of recent heavy flooding in Costa Rica. The man was very well-spoken, had a whole speech prepared, and the cause is a worthy one. There's just one problem: two weeks ago this same guy was wearing scrubs, claiming to be a med student and collecting money from three of my classes to buy morphine for terminally ill children. Friday, I gave him extremely dirty looks and the equivalent of US$0.03. I can't believe I caught a con artist! I wanted to shout on the bus and expose him to everyone... but I was so afraid that I was mistaken. Maybe I just really wanted to be mistaken. The bus ended up arriving in San José in less than half an hour, so I sat and steamed about bus-guy until Mike showed up for me to vent to.
Then we walked to Mike's host father Randall's office. Randall works for a travel agency, meaning he could go right into the airport and pick up Mike's family. He drove us to the airport and brought a sign that read "Amstrong," then rather unceremoniously abandoned us outside the airport while he went in to fetch Mike's mother and brother, Nate. This was problematic because we had expected to meet them outside the airport, and also because their name is Armstrong. Somehow, an hour later two non-Spanish speaking Americans emerged with a non-English speaking Costa Rican they did not know and were not expecting. Hugs and people talking over each other; the usual reunion scene mixed with it's-so-good-to-meet-you's. Then we all piled into Randall's car. Even this was interesting: Mike and I had been trying to decide which of the two of us (as the only non-Randall Spanish-speakers) should sit up front with Randall, and then his mom ended up sitting there. I got really nostalgic for our nightmare taxi ride after we arrived in July, and got to be in the interesting position of being the (relatively) calm one watching others experience their first car ride in Costa Rica traffic. Randall was driving OK, but Mike's mom still managed to be possibly the first person ever to apply the phrase "squeeze play" to a driving situation.
Randall dropped us off at the hotel, we checked in and promptly fell in love with Steve the Desk Guy, or Steves as he is more affectionately known. The hotel was roomy, gorgeous, and completely English speaking, which took the pressure off for translating (at least while we were there). The hotel was decorated with an odd mixture of pre-Colombian-style ceramics and goldwork, and colonial-era Spanish Catholic paintings, all right next to each other. It was like witnessing the conflict of colonization happen through artwork. Also, one of the paintings may or may not have been holding Voltron's Blazing Sword (it was either that or a light saber).
We settled in, Mrs. Armstrong told me I was "just the sweetest thing," and we grabbed lunch in the hotel restaurant. At this point, Mike ordered "café con menta" (coffee with mint) but actually said "café con mente" (coffee with mind). We teased him for ordering Coffee with Brains for possibly the whole weekend. After lunch, Mike led us on a walking tour of San José. We walked by a bunch of museums, government buildings, through an artesanía (artisan's market aka Souvenir Alley), through the pedestrian avenue, stopped for coffee at a really neat trendy café that Mike and I have been attempting to try for ages, fruitlessly tried catching a taxi in the rain for about half an hour, and eventually just walked back to the hotel. The highlight of the outing was when we walked through the Cultural Center and caught a glimpse of a youth theatre rehearsal. This basically involved 20 kids making sheep/monkey noises from a distance, sprinting toward us, climbing all over the old molasses processing machinery (the cultural center is an old molasses plant) and counting to 10. It was possibly the coolest random thing I've seen in Costa Rica or anywhere. After all that, we had dinner at the hotel and headed up to Nate and Mrs. Armstrong's room (or The Tower as we called it) for card games, namely Golf and Bohnanza, a ridiculous little game about bean farming that is dirty and addictive. Let me just say that Wikipedia's estimate of 1-hour gameplay is highly inaccurate when you barter as much as we did. After Bohnanza we were all pretty exhausted and headed to bed. Unfortunately, some random German guy decided to go for a 3am dip in "the small pool" (pretty much a fountain and the only pool at the hotel), and apparently this required a lot of shouting.
Saturday
After breakfast we cruised the gift shop and headed to La Paz. The hotel booked a semi-private tour for us, meaning a mini-sardine bus collected us and four others, drove us to La Paz with Spanish and English commentary along the way, and then the driver became our tour guide upon our arrival. La Paz is a really beautiful place about 3 hours from San José and at 6000 ft. elevation. It's pretty touristy, but still pretty gorgeous. First we "hiked" (everything was paved and had handrails) through a bird area, where we saw a bunch of birds and monkeys. The monkeys were very social... I was tempted to play with them. There was also one rather excited blue bird who flew into my right foot. I was standing still. He seemed unphased by it, however. Then we progressed to butterflies (one landed on my shoulder... I get all the love from nature) and hummingbirds. Then a break for lunch and we continued on to see snakes, frogs, cows, and drink agua dulce (warm sugar cane beverage... reminiscent of apple cider but made from molasses). After the animals came the waterfalls. It was raining the whole time were there; we got pretty much soaked and it was great. After all that, we made the nauseating trip back to the hotel... but not before seeing a bunch of raccoons eat some bananas. So, Mike and I each got to see our favorite animals and end the trip on a happy note.
After getting cleaned up, we picked out a restaurant from one of the guidebooks that was 3 blocks away from the hotel. However, it was dark and not safe to walk, so the security guard hailed us a taxi (read: walked into the middle of the street until one stopped). Mike was in charge of this operation and gave the taxi driver the address. Unfortunately, this taxi driver not only had not heard of the restaurant; he did not know which streets were which. Here's the thing: all streets in San Jose are numbered and ordered. It shouldn't be hard. However, any time he was asked anything about street numbers, the taxi would respond: "ay, me with numbers..." So we sort of just drove around in circles over and over again. Mike started getting more and more frustrated, basically subtly insulting the taxi driver by explaining to him how simple this drive should have been. I started giggling and translated for his mom, who also giggled and applauded Mike's assertiveness. So basically we're all sitting in the backseat giggling while Mike has to put up with possibly the second most clueless taxi driver we've ever had driving in circles for half an hour. Eventually he just dropped us off at the hotel again and we paid him $5. Thank goodness taxis are cheap here. We ended up walking a block to a pretty swanky restaurant and had a fantastic dinner. Got back to the hotel late and crashed. German guy must have been tired too, judging by the lack of small-pool-shouting.
Sunday
Everyone was pretty tired, so we decided against any more long-distance excursions (also Nate wanted to have as little of the Costa Rican car ride experience as possible) and instead picked out some local museums. We started off with the Children's Museum, which is basically like a Smithsonian for little kids, covering topics like outer space, nature, the human body, culture, and technology. We were the only adults in the museum unaccompanied by small children, but still managed to be possibly one of the least mature groups there. Points worth mentioning:
- we really felt the lack of Pluto from the solar system
- the museum staff laughed at me for getting startled by one of the displays
- translating signs, even if they are meant for children, is difficult
- when reading a sign that has to do with Don Quixote, if you don't know a word, it probably means "windmill"
- there was a small Prison Museum tucked away inside that was just a bunch of locked doors
- very little of the museum actually made sense
After the Children's Museum, we took a cab to UCR to show Nate and Mrs. Armstrong around the campus. The taxi driver was learning English and spoke to us in random words and phrases for the entire ride. Poor Mike was stuck in the front seat again, while we in the backseat could hear next to nothing. We tooled around campus for a bit, then stopped into a little Italian place called Il Pomodoro (which had a delightful cartoon tomato mascot, you really have no idea). The food was delicious albeit covered in cloves and cloves of garlic. It started to rain after lunch, so catching a taxi to our next destination became difficult yet again. We eventually caught one, all climbed in, went 20 feet and got kicked out of the cab. Apparently the Costa Rican Art Museum was out of that taxi's juresdiction. We caught another taxi (which covered the same exact juresdiction as the last one) which was willing to take us there. The art museum was pretty good, although we kind of paced it weird. Then we decided to try to take a tour of the National Theatre and hoped a taxi over there, but it was closed... so we went to a Pops (Costa Rican ice cream chain) instead. I ordered a bowl of a flavor called Brownie Dynamite, then two seconds later saw a poster for a fantastic-looking Brownie Dynamite sundae that cost exactly the same. Depressing. I'm half-tempted to go to the local Pops right now and get one.
After Pops, we walked back to the hotel, got cleaned up and played another round of Bohnanza, which ended just in time for me to pack up the last of my things and head back to Heredia before it got too late. More hugs and people talking over each other as I said my "goodbye"s and "see you in November"s to Mike's family. I was sorry to say goodbye to them; the weekend went really well and they're really looking forward to me traveling with them again in November.
But as sorry as I was to say goodbye to them, it was not nearly as sorry as I was to say goodbye to Mike... and I'll be seeing him again on Thursday! With every passing weekend, it gets more and more difficult to leave him for another week. Part of that is knowing that every week that goes by brings us that much closer to December and doing the long-distance thing for a while... but part of it is just that he honestly feels like my other half. Leaving him after spending so much time together is very jarring and harsh. I don't like doing it. But at the same time, it's kind of wonderful to feel this way. It's a good thing.
And on that Martha Stewart note, I sign off.