The first thing you notice about Costa Rica is not the rainforest, or the beach, or the fancy resorts. Rather, it´s the way people interact..even with minimal competence in Spanish, it has become more and more clear that there is a sense of community here completely absent in the United States.
When I eat a meal, it is more often than not produced locally. Costa Rica does not (cannot?) rely on other countries for its rice and beans, or its bread and butter. Of course, when you go to a McDonald´s in the U.S., you´re eating an American burger (maybe), yet you still have no idea where it comes from. In this country, everything has a fresh, local taste. It amazes me how many Americans are trying to go "organic", which is all peachy..but how organic can a fruit be when it´s flown in from another hemisphere? I am on the 20-fruits-a-day diet, and they all come from Costa Rica. (Sadly, also the 20-cups-of-coffee-diet, but I´m convinced there´s no better coffee in the world)
Without a computer or the internet or a book or a magazine or the latest fashion news from Hollywood, I find myself constantly interacting with my surroundings. How often do we take a minute out of our day to study what´s going on around us? Of course, this is part of being a traveler, but it is also a product of life without the petty distractions we seem to live off of.
There is more love here than I have ever seen..each family is sown together in such a natural way. To me, that´s what organic means..love minus the chemicals: gossip, drama, propaganda. It´s not our fault that these petty things seem to penetrate our daily lives, but we also must take responsibility for the decisions we make. Cliché, I know, but I realize now that winter doesn´t mean me and the internet need to be best friends. Or that a day off from work means a day with HBO...
Everyone who walks by my home here stops in to say hello. In a half-mile radius of my home in the U.S., I know maybe 3 neighbors? 4? It´s those personal decisions we need to re-examine. So I´m sorry if this first blog post is a bit unclear, but I guess I´m just generally shocked at the organic sense of community everyone has here..something we lost a long time ago.
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Thanks for checking in everyone! I´ll be trying to blog every Saturday while I´m here..I´m sorry for any typos etc..but Spanish is very intensive here, and there´s not much time to speak English!
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