What are we doing in Costa Rica?

I taught Graham to use his fingers for spraying, something I’m sure I’ll come to regret. 

 

Famous last words: “Don’t point that thing at anyone else!”

We’re here for too long. We’re not here for long enough. 

Someone once told me that it takes two years after a move to make a place feel like home. That was certainly true for me when we moved to San Marcos; it took quite a while to settle in, make new friends, and feel like it was home. I’ve grown to love it there. We have amazing friends, I have no trouble filling the days with things to do with the kids, and I feel like a part of the community. But for much of the first year I felt isolated and grumpy. 

We’re now 2/3 of the way through our Costa Rican summer, and the current plan is to spend our last 10 days in the center of the country. That means we only have ~16 days left here. It’s nostalgia time! We can now take inventory of what we’ve experienced and learned. What will we miss? What won’t we?

On the one hand, I feel like three or four weeks would have given me an ample taste of like on the Caribbean coast. That part of me feels like we should have divided our time equally between several areas of the country. It wouldn’t have been a bad approach. Some of my complaints about the trip would have been irrelevant, or else I would have had the distraction of changes in scenery to ease them. 

On the other hand, I think the best kind of travel is that which allows you to get a taste of what it’s like to live in a place, not just visit it.  Would I have gotten that with just a two or three week visit? I think not. We wouldn’t have bothered to settle in, arrange tofu deliveries, or make friends. And if we weren’t about to leave, we would be experiencing so much more here. I know that on some levels we’ve only scratched the surface. Having our own home here, the kids attending school, finding work locally, etc, would all have been interesting and enlightening, I’m sure. We’ve been straddling two worlds rather than fully plunging into this one, and of course that affects the experience. 

Three months is a long time. Graham was talking again today about how much he misses our home in Texas. He wants to see his friends, sleep in his own bed, know what the days will bring. I miss the people, the pets (including our poor Frida dog, who just had her surgery!), the luxuries of middle class American life. But I’m glad we did this. Three months is short in the context of an entire lifetime, and I’m glad to have spent them doing something so unique.