Costa Rica 1

I am in Costa Rica, Gentle Reader, and I will revive the Gratitude series when I am back in April.  Right now I am in the airport town, Alajuela, waiting for my taxi ride to the bus stop for Monteverde where I will be spending most of the month. 

Its been the usual routine, so far.  Yesterday morning I pulled myself out of bed on less than three hours sleep, even though I went to bed at nine the night before.  It always seems hard to sleep the night before a plane trip.  I wonder what causes the stress?  Could there even be a less than conscious fear that the plane will crash and that will be it?  I often believe that we all carry many such deeply unconscious fears and impulses that often surface as vestigial reactions to things.

Basically, flight was never part of our design as human beings.  It is not a natural form of travel for us, though indeed is somewhat wonderful, and if you are well off enough for business class it can be even quite enjoyable.  But flight was never part of the package for our earliest ancestors, who never really went higher than tree branches.  So when you consider that we have spent almost all of our half million years or so of existence on the land, while even daring to cross oceans on boats, air travel has only been in the picture for us for the last hundred years or so.  In other words, it will likely take us a few thousand years to get really used to it so that it actually gets programmed into our DNA.  In the meantime, I think we can expect that we are all going to have some kind of fear of flying, even if we happen to be in full denial.

I did meet a colleague of mine from work at the Vancouver airport yesterday.  Herself a native Costa Rican, she was also going to be on the same flight as me.  We chatted a lot in Spanish and it was enjoyable for both of us, I think.  I flew Air Canada, and I did not have to land in the USA, much to my relief given the odious monster now inhabiting the White House and the way he is already impacting things just over a month into his presidency. 

Politics aside, we changed planes in Toronto and landed in Costa Rica, more or less on time.  A local cab driver claimed me at the airport and took me to the bed and breakfast where I am spending my first and last nights in Costa Rica.

Breakfast was enjoyable, shared with four other guests, a young couple from  París, France, and a mother and daughter from Barcelona, Spain.  Sincé the young French woman spoke Spanish our entire conversation was conducted in el idioma de los angeles (the language of the angels), though her partner must have felt left out, since he seems to speak only French and English.

Alajuela, the airport town, is kind of shabby, with tropical luxuriance bursting out everywhere.  I stopped in the cathedral for part of  mass, then later began a new drawing inside a café.  It is warm, but not suffocatingly hot.  There are people out everywhere and everyone seems somehow connected in the community.  The flowers are amazing.