The People You Meet In the Caribbean

1. THE BUS STATION ATTENDANT

He begins, as all good Tico boys do, by visibly checking me out while I wait for the bus. Do you speak Spanish? I look at him like he´s speaking Mandarin. He continues to try to speak to me and I continue pretending I don´t speak a word of Spanish, because I am kidding myself pretending that that will convince him to leave me alone. And the game is harder than you think, because what he is saying is a clear as English. He tells me I have beautiful eyes. Never heard that one before! In fact, that´s probably the only pickup line they ever use. Except that no one is ever necessarily trying to pick me up- I don´t sense that it´s so goal oriented. People here, they're just flirtatious, and I¨m just a shy 5-year-old inside who wants to be left alone by strangers because they´re probably teasing her.

Bus station boy stands about 3 feet away from me and stares at me for the next 10 minutes. I don´t know if this have ever happened to you. It´s unusual- unusually rude, unusually creepy, and unusually ballsy. As uncomfortable and offended as I was, I had to keep suppressing a laugh because it was so silly. When the bus pulls up, I lose it. ¨Don´t you think it´s rude to stare at me so? Please, a little respect. I said that lie because I didn´t want you hitting on me all this time!¨ I make a couple of grammatical mistakes, but it´s good enough to put him to shame. He lowers his eyes, says sorry in English and Spanish, and walks away.

2. MELANIE AND WINDEL

2 of 10 siblings, they were born in Costa Rica on the Caribbean side but moved to Florida when they were kids. Now considering early retirement, they are looking to move back home. Widnel is my bus seat buddy on the way to Puerto Viejo. He is a giant. Remember when I say this that I am used to tall men- my father is six foot four or more. Windel is six six. He has size 13 feet. His hands are bigger, fingers spread, than a plate. He is sitting next me to for 5 hours.

Tomorrow he is borrowing a friend´s truck to go down to the zona libre in Panama, where you can buy cheap electronics tax free. In Costa Rica electronics cost more than in the U.S. Windel is going to get a stove and fridge for his house in Cahuita, which he shows me pictures of on his iphone.

We get into a conversation about what I´m doing in the country, and he asks me a series of my favorite questions- What is yoga? Is it a religion? If I´m a Christian, can I do yoga? Is it a form of meditation? What are the benefits? I explained that it is a series of physical postures to stretch and tone the body, focusing on deep breathing and the present moment. While meditation uses the mind to calm the restlessness of the body and mind, yoga uses movement to balance this restlessness while giving the body a massage from the inside out. Yoga was ¨invented ¨, if you will, by a bunch of Hindu mystics, but it is more of a science than a religion. You can be an atheist and practice many aspects of yoga. The idea is to achieve ¨bliss¨, which means union with the divine, but yoga doesn´t posit anything higher than that, so if Christ is your god, it´s about letting go of your individual self and getting a little closer to him. I love to explain yoga in layman´s terms, because it is such a beautiful and simple thing. Windel, once a skeptic, seemed pretty down with yoga.

3. SARA, GARRET, CAM, AND DAVID

Once Windel gets off the bus in Cahuita, I chat up my other fellow gringos in the nearby seats. We are all heading to the same hostel so we decide to split a cab. David works for UPS, Garret mentors at-risk youth in LA, Cam is a kinesiologist who plans to travel the world, and Sara is an overbearing college student from Canada. We get to the hostel, Rocking J´s, which is covered head to toe with mosaics and super trippy murals. I rent a hammock for $6 a night. The 5 of us go out on the town to eat and drink. Puerto Viejo is a sleepy little Caribbean party town with dirt streets, Rastas galore, surfers, Rasta surfers, and lots of mostly young people on vacation. Most people get around by bike. You can smoke weed everywhere, in the restaurants, in the streets, on the beach. The beach is a rough surf with rip tides and coral reefs, with tons of palm trees, and almond trees that bend over to kiss the waves with their leaves. One of the liquor stores in town projects movies onto a big screen across the street each night, so you can buy a beer or whatever and drink while you watch the movie for free from the picnic tables. Sara and I followed the boys around for a little while while they chased tail, and then we all went back to the hostel. While it was clear that these were not my people, it was nice to explore with companions, and I always disengage from groups easily.

4. YASETH, LAURA, AND WHATSHISFACE

The next morning I meet 3 Josefinos (from San Jose), who have hammocks near me. They're childhood friends on vacation. Laura, 19, is in school for nutrition and has an 18-month old. Yaseth, 28, is a chef and has lived in CT and Italy, but right now he's just hanging out, looking for something new. He speaks English, but Laura doesn't really, so I default to Spanish. Whatshisface doesn't talk much- he's probably really stoned. We take a walk to the beach and find some really nice spots, and just sit and hang out. Laura and I chat, but she's really hard to understand, her words are so fast. It's like in English, if I said to you, "Do you have a car?", it's going to come out "Djuva car?" Say it out loud. That's basically how we speak, and we understand one another. While meanwhile some poor non-native speaker is wandering around wondering what the hell "djuva" means. Yaseth is the third Costa Rican chef I've met. That's a lot of chefs for a small country.

5. THE ROMANIAN BROTHERS

I meet them when I go to buy bottle water at a little hostel's restaurant. They're playing pool and smoking, and we strike up a conversation. Some adorable kids come with a basket of homemade bread in their arms, straight from the oven, and we each buy some. I'm skeptical because baked goods in this country are reminiscent of those horrible little buns they used to put in school lunch. Actually, this bread is yeasty, warm, smoky, and full of melted butter and cheese, and sugar, so it's sweet and salty and just soaked with delicious filling.

The brothers are from Canada, but their family is Romanian and they speak in it to one another. They were traveling for a while, but they stayed in Puerto Viejo because they loved it so much. They've been living at the hostel now for 2 months.

6. MOISES

Moises is one of those people I'm not sure is really real. He's from Mexico City, has a head full of dreads, and his body is covered with indigenous tribal tattoos of lunar eclipses, sacred geometry, and skeleton gods. He is a jewelry artisan and has an open, generous face. He was staying at the hostel, and said hello to me and I sat down at the table like we had known each other a long time, and we were friends for the rest of my stay. He taught me how to weave bracelets and offered me tea several times a day. I taught him a few words of English here and there. Moises is special because he's the first real friend I've had in Spanish. I've had a few relationships here and there with the people I meet incidentally, but this is the first time I have crossed the language barrier spontaneously and gotten to know someone just because they seemed nice. And because of that it is much less awkward, because I don't feel the cultural barrier. Believe it or not, it's the first time I've felt like I have things in common with someone who only speaks Spanish. He's traveled a lot, which I think makes him different from the people who barely ever leave San Pablo. And he speaks clearly and slowly, so I understand him. And he corrects me when I speak badly, which is so helpful. I think in 2 days my Spanish improves more than in the last 2 months in Costa Rica. As the days move toward the weekend, the hostel seems to convert more to Spanish. At meal times everyone crowds this little hole in the wall of a kitchen and then eats at the long picnic tables. Several of us are non-native speakers, but we're in amongst the Argentinian slang and the Tico slurring doing the best we can, and for once, it feels like we, or at least I, and doing ok.

7. MY FRIENDS

I was at the hostel bar with Moises and this lovely French girl who is doing her masters in organic agriculture. And I'm feeling that Friday night loneliness. Really just feeling so far from home, so anonymous, so far from anything that feels like home or emotionally safe. Those things are all I really want.

And then I see someone who looks a lot like this kid who goes to Wednesday night vespers at Wesleyan. And then I notice that he is carrying a Wesleyan water bottle. So I run up to him, and, lo and behold, his name is Paul and he is here with 5 other Wesleyan students, 3 of whom I know and love personally.

Great Joy! Ague and Veronica went to an international high school in Costa Rica and they are back to visit the country over winter break. Meggie, Nick, Paul and Su are here to join them. Somehow they chose the exact same city and the exact same hostel on the exact same night as I did. Incidentally, this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. On my birthright trip last January, we picked up a stray 2008 graduate we found in Jerusalem for a couple of days. It was the Wesleyan sweatshirt that got him. Lesson: I need to start sporting some Wesleyan paraphernalia because we are everywhere. I think it truly speaks to what a great choice the school was for me that I really feel like I have some je ne sais quoi in common with other students and grads. As people i generally like them more than other random people I meet.

On Saturday we rent bikes to go down the street to Cahuita. If Puerto Viejo is a rollicking, pot-smoking, flirtatious 21-year-old in a belly shirt, Cahuita is her 32-year-old sister, married with kids. After 17 crotch-punishing kilometers on a one-speed mountain bike with a wire basket on the front, the kind you ride completely upright, we arrive in Cahuita which has a beautiful national park with beach trails. I share with everyone my love for pipa, and we eat our coconuts and walk the mangrove trail to the beach. It has very gentle waves and warm water. We splash around talking about all the people we know, what we want to be when we grow up, and, of course, capitalism.

On the walk back form the beach I saw my first monkeys in Costa Rica! Two kinds, black face and white face. Monkeys are way cool. Also, they have prehensile tails. I think maybe coming out of the trees was a big mistake for us in terms of having awesome body mechanics and also modes of transportation. Then we saw sloths! A mommy sloth and a baby sloth that she was carrying, and then this other sloth that came up to the mommy and kissed (well, licked) her! Of course I deconstructed completely into a cooing and sighing sack of ovaries and stood there until my neck was totally strained from craning up into the tree tops. We made our ET-reminiscent bike ride back, had a beautiful dinner, played bananagrams (!!!), and made up stories in hammocks until the wee hours of the morning. Sunday was another long and exhausting travel day to go back to the hotel, complete with prosthelytizing Nicaraguan dudes cornering me in the bus, but it was so wonderful to run into those guys and have a chance to feel really at home for a day. My friend Evan always used to say, "home is people", and I think that's part of the truth.