I’m posting this from a misty hill in Costa Rica. We took the bus from the coast to the interior, which was cramped but otherwise trouble-free. It’s always the last leg of the journey, though— Costa Rica isn’t really a street name culture, so the names of the streets are kind of randomly assigned, just various numbers, and a lot of time people decide that they’d rather live on caille 17 than caille 15 so they switch the signs. Or they have a few extra caille 21 signs so they name four or five streets caille 21.

So we missed our connecting bus, and had to take a taxi to our final hotel, which cost a wincing amount of money. But at the end we arrived at our simple but really nice B&B here near Arenal volcano. It’s a vegetarian place, we’re the only guests, and the awesome family cooked us a meal with herbs taken directly from their garden and when we were done our scraps were added to the compost to go back into the garden.

It’s been a really interesting trip so far. It’ll take awhile to really digest it all, but one of my favorite things so far has just been Costa Ricans. The slogan around here is “pura vida”, which means ‘the pure life’ but actually means “don’t sweat the small stuff” or “it’s all just life, man, take it easy, enjoy what you can and learn from the rest”. And it comes from, apparently, a 1965 Mexican movie of that title, which I’ll have to watch. I don’t know how ‘pure life’ can mean ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’, but it’s a great philosophy no matter what.

And it’s not said in like, a hippie-dippiesh kind of way, but halfway between soulfully sincere and ironically amused. Did your car get a flat and you have no replacement, so you can’t go on the hike you’d planned? Pura vida, go sit on the beach. Or, as one guide said, “There’s rarely only one way to be happy. If you get disappointed in one thing, do another. Or, I guess, you could just stay angry.”

There’s other interesting social stuff here. One of them is that all the houses have bars on the windows, or substantial fences and gates around the houses— but then the gates are open, the front doors are open, and people are just sitting around taking it as it comes. People aren’t worried about ‘home invasion’, just having their stuff stolen while they’re away, and one guy referred to the bars as ‘removing temptation from the unfortunate’.

I doubt I really have any great insights into Costa Rican culture after this brief visit, but it’s definitely made me eager to learn more.