If you are lucky, your first impressions of a place will be both accurate and somehow profound - so when you put them in sentences and commit them to being read by someone who actually has any experience of it, you won't come across as a complete idiot. But my first impressions of Costa Rica were formed in the bleary fog of being awake far too long before I got off the plane, of the disconcertion that air travel seems to bring to the inexperienced traveller (namely me) and the fact that I fell asleep before we got out of San Jose and never saw how it became that up to which I awoke. My second impressions are, unfortunately when it comes to making any sense of it all, modifications of my first by way of a day to which I have nothing in my past to compare it, so you might as well peg me as that idiot now and be done with it.
Maybe I should just back up and do the plane thing first.
There is an easy way to get to the airport in Detroit - I've done it twice - and then there is the way we took, which was not so straightforward. In the end, this did not matter, because we easily made the flight. There were moments when I worried that we were driving around the world's largest landing field without an entrance to the terminal, that it had been laid out by a direct descendant of the farmer in the joke who said " you caint get there from here," and meant it. Then I worried at the baggage check counter that the tube holding Geoff's fishing rod would remind Homeland Security of a bazooka mated with a pipe-bomb - and it didn't, and then I worried that I would die when the plane failed to get into the air, but not in a way that actually caused me any distress, if you know what I mean. Perhaps I was a little punchy, even before the flight.
It would not be fair to Continental Airlines to write disparagingly of their planes, and the service on them - firstly because the return tickets we purchased are a bargain, and it seems silly to whine about saving money, and secondly because I have so little experience on airlines that I lack any reference points to know if I have anything about which to complain. That complete idiot thing again. I would have liked more space between me and my neighbours; I would definitely have liked it if the cabin pressure had been high enough so that it did not take me nine hours after we landed in San Jose before I could hear properly again. But I don't think any of this is Continental's fault.
Street lights from above are orange -whole cities are orange star clusters - sun rises are spectacular, although I was on the wrong side of the plane to see the one piped in especially for us. A picture is included.
Texas - who knew that there were so many trees around Houston? I mean, other than anyone who has ever lived there, or visited it, or flown over. For some reason, the only pictures of Houston I can recall are ones of the Johnson Space Center which I had seen as a kid, nary a tree in sight, and this is what I suppose I expected to find, if I thought about it, which I didn't. See - complete idiot.
There was a bit more room on the flight from Houston to San Jose, for a given value of more. I had chewing gum this time so there was not as much problem with my ears, for a given value of ears. I awoke on the first flight as we were descending into Houston and could not hear the jet engines - they might have been shut off, or fallen off the plane for all I knew. On the second descent, I knew they were there. Kinda.
On this flight I sat next to a pretty, little officina - as she so labelled herself while filling out out the profession part of the Costa Rican immigration form we all completed before landing. That is to say, she wrote officina and I mentally appended the adjectives pretty and little. She was Costa Rican, travelling with her husband, she said, an American from Kansas where they now lived. They too had got a deal on the purchase of their tickets, and only had to sit eleven rows apart. (Neither Jane, David nor I were together either, although it was a mere matter of two or three rows for us.) We came in to San Jose over mountains starting to lose the greeness of the rainy season, crossed convoluted hills and valleys through which dirt roads wound, watched houses and farms laid out according to whim and geography and no civic planning whatsoever grow larger and closer beneath the wings, and she looked upset and wiped away a tear or two, which I carefully did not notice.
Two days on here, I am beginning to understand why she might miss this place.
And here I have to leave off, still not having dealt in any meaningful way with my first impressions of Costa Rica. I could say that San Jose is a dirty place - or at least a place that has trash everywhere waiting to be picked up - and not convey in any way the sense that this is not a slight on the people who live there. I could say that there are buildings that look worn and stained, but the citizens aren't, that their cars are rode hard and put away wet, that they drive like cheerful maniacs, and still not get across the idea that this place seems good in a way unlike the Canadian cities I know. We were waved through Customs, because we were obviously a family. At a bus station so far removed from anything touristy that Jane could use no English to by the tickets, I saw families with children - well behaved, obviously loved, polite, clean, well-dressed, quiet children - who remained all of these things on a four and a half hour bus ride with only one short rest stop. The bus had lost a minor argument with a hard object in its path at some time in its past; it needed cleaning; it was driven with quiet competance by a driver who made the best possible time on a two lane road on which there is never not a convoy of vehicles in front of it as it snakes up, down and around the mountains, never a break in the stream of transport trucks and cars coming in the other direction. As evening fell, nearly every house we passed had people sitting out front, talking with each other. A country of people who talk to each other - how strange.
The man sitting next to me fell asleep; his head ended up on my shoulder when the bus shifted him going into curves. He would wake up, move and go back to sleep - I know just enough Spanish to have told him that I speak none, which would not have solved the problem, so I decided it wasn't a big enough thing to bother about.
All self-respecting houses I have seen here are componds - surrounded by walls, spiked fences, small gates, barb wire, razor wire, bars on the windows, broken pop bottles set in cement - but there is no sense of imminent violence. Even houses too poor for adequate security have as much of it as they can afford, and the air of doing so just to show that they can. A determined thief would not be slowed down.
Somebody here is always working on their car; almost none of the vehicles are North American. I have seen Datsuns (Datsuns have been Nissans longer than most of my children have been alive) that turned into rust flakes back home three decades ago still on the road, and at least one truck, pictured at the top of this entry, that should have been driven to the nearest junkyard and left there with its cargo. It had no grille, no driver's door, no muffler, no tread, no suspension to speak of, no panel undented or unscraped. And on the same roads I have seen some of Japan's and Europes latest, cars that I couldn't afford.
Unfortunately, I think I am failing at getting across my first impressions; or at least sorting them out. I am going to stop trying, for now. Jane and Geoff and David have been having a great old time out by the pool with Geoff's neighbours from Venezuela for the last couple of hours while I typed this, and I'm going out to see what all the laughter is on about.
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