Gold, Smoke And Mirrors

22 August, Friday, 2008
 

The locust plague from Austria returned yesterday and already this morning I have clashed with two of them.  They tend to take over, given there are five or six of them, they all seem to be in their early twenties and they just appear completely obtuse to the fact that there are other guests in the hotel.  My huge issue with them is smoking.  The computer area is also the smoking area, which they occupied as a group for the entire evening, and it is not fun having to sit in a room full of second smoke if you want to get any work done.  I was at the computer early this morning, 5:30 which seems to be the best time to go online around here.  Then one guest came in to wait for the computer, and decided to light a cigarette.  So I mentioned he could have the computer since I am highly sensitive to cigarette smoke.  He offered to put it out, and I replied that I don´t make the rules here. Later, when I came in from my walk about 7 this morning, it was available.  I hadn´t been here for two minutes when two of the Austrians came in and lit up.  So, we had a bit of a clash and I let them have the computer.

This is a very good example of what I mean when I say that I don´t travel well.  Even though the issue of public smoking is fraught with cultural baggage, for me it is essentially a health issue, and if visiting a foreign country means jeopardizing my health because they are lax about public smoking then I would just as soon stay home.  Likewise with being vegetarian.  This can also make travel very complicated, or at least in Central America.  Of course, there are hotel accommodations for non-smokers but these are often way out of my budget.  You have to be relatively well-off if you are going to travel well.  I´m not.   I want to go home.

I was just at El Museo de Oro Precolombio, or the Museum of pre-Colombian gold, where they have a huge collection of indigenous gold artifacts with displays and dioramas about the life and culture of the indigenous people´s of Costa Rica before Columbus.  Many of the pieces on display are exquisite and replete with magical and sacred meaning.  I thought it sad that now these people, like our own First Nations Peoples have been so disempowered and that their symbols of power and culture are now on display in collections belonging to their oppressors.  For a moment I wondered what would happen should the indigenous peoples of this country repossess their gold.  There is also an interesting display about the comparative histories of Costa Rican and Ecuadoran money.  The many images and symbols that are impressed or printed upon metal and paper money seem to have been drawn from the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.  In this way, money seems in many ways to symbolize or envision the identity of a people as a culture and a nation.  I would imagine that this could mean a huge spiritual and meta-psychological factor in the value that is invested in money.