When I walked into my San Jose hotel today, it was with a totally overblown sense of pride. I had just, amazingly, completed…the simplest task. I had gotten myself from the airport to a downtown hotel, completely alone, speaking only en Español. A first sentence to the cabbie, “Sabe donde está el Hotel Cacts?” Then, later, as we were driving, “Como se dice ‘el metro’ en Costa Rica?” I thought that I remembered that Costa Rican taxi meters have their own affectionate nickname. And was rewarded with the answer: “La María.”
This may not be the most impressive conversation that you’ve ever heard in Spanish, but it was a major coup for me. I am fluent in one language alone—and you are reading it. Purportedly, I have reading proficiency in both French and German. My graduate transcript attests to this far-fetched notion with a nice round pair of “A”s. In reality, if ever I were faced with a German or French text that I actually needed to, ahem, understand, well, there is no doubt that I would have to hire a translator.
I am not proud of this. In fact, I am so deeply embarrassed about it, that it actively conflicts with my ability to rectify the situation. On my flight from Toronto to San Jose, I had a layover in San Salvador. On the first leg of my trip, I sat next to an El Salvadoran ex-pat, living in Ottawa, who told me how impressed he is with people from the United States, with how “aggressively” they pursue foreign languages, unashamed of the flaws in their grammar or accent. We’re so different from Latin Americans, he told me, who are too cautious about making mistakes, crippling their ability to practice using another language.
Let’s just set aside how surprising this generalization is, how much it completely contradicts what I would otherwise have assumed to be an almost global opinion on Americans’ xenophobic ignorance of other languages and cultures. Upon accepting this extremely flattering take on American aggression, I immediately had to confess to this very sweet (and very fluent en Inglés, I should note) man that I, an otherwise aggressive American (to say the least, my Canadian friends might assert) am deeply, painfully diffident in this respect.
Given that background, you can probably see why I am so absurdly proud of my grade-school-worthy conversation with a taxi driver. It seemed like a pretty solid start to my two weeks in Costa Rica, so I decided to reward myself with una cerveza. When in Costa Rica, drink like a Tica, so now I am sitting on the hotel’s rooftop patio, drinking a bottle of Imperial, waiting for my husband Bryn’s arrival.
For the previous week, Bryn has been one of the instructors of a tropical ecology field course, leading a group of University of Toronto undergraduates around Costa Rica in what has been, for most of them, a first exposure to hot tropical rainforests and frigid cloudforests. From what I’ve heard so far, these students have been extremely lucky. They have seen a sloth, crocodiles, quetzals, an eyelash viper, a mother humpback whale nursing its baby, and much, much more.
Already I know that I am never going to get quite this lucky during my two weeks in Costa Rica. After the students leave, Bryn and I are heading off to collect mushrooms. Yeah, it’s a mycological collecting trip during the dry season. It’s a little strange, since mushrooms thrive in wet conditions. But sometimes field biologists must take what they can get. The course created an opportunity (read: plane ticket to Central America) that simply could not be refused, despite the lack of rain.
And, after all, even in the dry season, rainforests and cloudforests can hardly be parched. The Eastern slopes of central Costa Rica, descending from the Talamanca mountains down to the sea, meet gusts of warm, wet Caribbean air during the dry season, making the East the wettest side of the country at the moment. So we are heading to Tapantí-Macizo National Park, a place that receives something like 800 cm of rain annually. Only about 80 cm of that impressive total fall during the months of February and March. But—with luck—it will be just enough!
