Antes del viaje (before the trip)...
During my month in Costa Rica I often visualized the maps of El Salvador and Guatemala, the Diego Rivera posters, the five-foot weaving of yarn and playground grasses, and the dozens of colorful tapestries woven by my fourth grade class. It was in this classroom of bright rugs and cluttered cubbies that I made crafts to sell in our Mercado, a marketplace whose proceeds went to a small, recovering village in El Salvador.

The year's studies of Central and South America intrigued me. My friends and I would sit on the playground and plan to travel to Central America some day. Not only were we fascinated by the culture, we were anxious to speak Spanish. It was a mystery to me why I could not carry on a conversation in the language yet. (I realized later that there are not many conversations that solely require vocabulary for numbers, dates, colors, pencil, blackboard, door and window.) My dream of actually being among Spanish speakers persisted through sophomore year in high school.

Last winter I was in the midst of a harrowing decision. Should I go back to my singing camp with good friends? Or should I take the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica? It was remembering fourth grade and my dream of traveling to Central America that finally pushed my decision.

el primero de julio (July 1, 1999)
Sitting on the airplane from Houston to San Jose, I wondered what I was doing there. The hours in the airport meeting the other gringos (Americans) on my trip had been exhausting. Every word I said was weighed in my own mind. What would the others think of me? Should I have used that word and that tone of voice? Maybe they don't like me now? I knew that subconsciously I, too, was judging people by their words and subtle expressions, but I could not push the stop button of my own prejudices.

Customs was a large room full of people speaking a jumbled mix of languages. My sense of time was on hold, and I could not tell whether it had been a day or a month since I had hugged my parents goodbye in Boston's Logan airport. As I stepped into Costa Rican air for the first time, I braced myself for hot and humid weather, because July is the middle of the invierno (winter) or rainy season. But my first breath proved cool and breezy, the first of many delightful surprises.

Por la noche, el mismo día (At night, the same day):
La Dehesa is a lovely Bed and Breakfast outside of San Jose. I grabbed a bottom bunk in a 4-bunk room, and took some deep breaths. So far, no one was speaking Spanish, but hopefully that would change as people got comfortable.

Oddly enough I was not homesick, but rather bewildered. I didn't feel like I belonged at all. The kids, so immersed in pop culture, confused me. I felt my self-righteousness creeping up ominously in my gut, clamoring to burst out of my mouth and condemn the movies the were discussing, the pompous comments about Tico (Costa Rican) culture, the homophobic slang. Should I fight my desire to tell them what I think? I had spoken out against a homophobic comment made by a group member in the airport and felt self-conscious and ostracized by people's averted eyes and embarrassed grins.

Was it worth it?

el 3 de julio
As our first community service project, and as an opportunity to bond, the kids and three leaders walked and took a short public bus ride to Amigos de las Aves (Friends of the Birds). Margot and Richard, an elderly American couple, have successfully bred wild macaws in captivity, a feat never before accomplished. Their goal is to release many of the birds back into the wild to save this endangered bird of Costa Rica. Their house is full of all sorts of birds, including a parrot from Nigeria, and two that spoke to us cordially in Spanish. We broke into groups to clean the fifty-foot cages with hose and push-broom. On the way there and the way back, Helen and I chatted in Spanish. So far she is the only kid besides me who has an interest in the language. Funny, I thought this trip was advertised as a language immersion!

In the afternoon we came across some little Tico boys playing fútbol, soccer, on the village green. They invited us to play with them, grinning broad grins, and jostling each other, giggling at our broken Spanish. After running and passing for a short while I realized two things. First, these boys knew how to handle a ball. Though the oldest couldn't have been older than thirteen and the youngest was seven, every one of them could outwit me with a bala, and I had played soccer for seven years in the United States. Second, every one of the boys was friendly, welcoming, and patient with our Spanish. In between plays we would chat about school and soccer vocabulary, but close the talk ceased as soon as the bala came and was replaced by yells of Spanish names across the field. I tried to imagine a parallel group of American boys being as inviting to a bunch of Costa Rican teenagers who did not speak English well. I couldn't.

el 4 de julio
White water rafting gave me my first experience in a rain forest (not a tropical rain forest, but a humid one), a long-awaited destination. A rainbow of green arched in all directions, from the banks of the river into the high trees, down to the lush brush of the forest floor. Cait, paddling in front of me and occasionally glancing back over the shoulder of her orange life-preserver, made fun of the silly grin that threatened to make my face muscles sore.

Half way through the trip we beached our balsas, rafts, on a mound of smooth rocks that looked suspiciously like the beans we had eaten at every meal. Then, to my surprise, we jumped into the river and swam to the other side. The water was warm and our life-preservers made the swimming simple.

We each scaled the ten- foot wall of mud and rocks and stood huddled together, laughing, on the muddy shore. Then, like penguins pushing one member of their group into the water to test for sea lions, we jumped one by one into the warm, muddy river.

One of the thousands of spherical rocks found mysteriously in Costa Rica. This is overlooking San Jose from the National Museum.

Playing soccer on San Antonio's plaza.

Coming in the next articles:
   -Monteverde, a Costa Rican Cloud Forest
   -A small Tico village
   -Summitting tallest peak in Costa Rica

Shoshana Friedman, lives in Newton, Massachusetts, is a singer and is currently studying different styles of music including theatrical, jazz and folk.