Walking, eating, winning, and whining... in no certain order

My 4:15 a.m. alarm was not welcome this morning. 4:15 is not so odd in the country, but here in the “big city” of Acosta, even my hosts weren’t going to get up with me to see me off this morning. They showed me how to work the coffee maker the night before, and that’s what is really important after all. I had to get up at 4:15 because I wanted to get to an agricultural market in San Jose in time to actually see some of the produce and one of the vendors told me that things sell out by 9:30. Why so soon? It’s a small, organic market with a loyal and early-rising clientele.

I took a 5:15 bus to San Jose and arrived at the market by taxi around 7:30. The bus ride was excruciatingly long because there were many pick-ups along the route and because there are some not-so-pretty places in the pavement due to recent earth shifting and mudslides as of late.

When I arrived at the market, it was otherworldly. The clientele was a mix of internationals and Ticos. I spied a male vendor wearing rainbow striped socks and a flowered apron (you will not see this in the countryside where I conducted my research). Vendors struggled to convince potential clients of the healing wonders of bee pollen and fish oil.

There was REAL bread.

When I say real bread, I mean the kind of bread that, once inside the loaf, one encounters firm, dense, innards, not the useless, tasteless paper fluff that passes for bread here. The national past time here is to eat bread, but the problem is that the bread bites. Our guidebook for Central America says that Costa Rica’s national chain bakery should be jailed for crimes against bread and pastry. And it’s true.

The first time I lived here, I was initially excited to see so many bakeries. But looks can be deceiving. Sure, they have long skinny baguette bags, but that long skinny baguette-looking object in it is in no way, shape, or form a baguette. To make matters worse, in addition to eating the bad bread, I have seen many people (for whom I otherwise have great respect) slathering their bread in Numar, a foul tasting margarine that is popular here. The point here is that my Costa Rican bread experience is sort of like the antithesis of my bread experience studying abroad in France in 97. And I won’t even start about the cheese here.

But the purpose of all this ranting is really just to contextualize how happy I was to encounter a loaf of bread that made a convincing argument that it might actually taste like a loaf of bread as opposed to say, those Styrofoam nuggets people chuck in fragile mail packages. So, I bought two loaves of bread.

I also bought organic raspberry preserves, some hard candies to gift to my hostess, a beautiful Peruvian wrap (light blue Alpaca wool, a steal at 12 bucks), and some organic baby corncobs from my friend and former neighbor in the country who has an organic farm.

When I got home, I toasted a big slice of the sourdough I bought, added some REAL butter pats, and topped that off with some Raspberry preserves. I was so happy. I ate so much bread that I had to go out and walk six miles to make myself feel like I had burnt into the ridiculous amounts of carbohydrates I had consumed.

Costa Rica is a nation that will never embrace the low carb diet scheme. Here’s proof: last night my hostess offered me macaroni and cheese with a side of rice. In the rural community where I did my research, people thought it queer that I did not want to eat rice, potatoes, tortillas, and yucca in the same meal. Macaroni and other pastas are slowly working their way into the diet, but they manifest themselves in strange combinations. Most people here seem reluctant to take on the idea of actually making a tomato based spaghetti sauce, even though all the ingredients one would need to do such a thing (tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, rosemary, oregano, parsley, onions, red wine, beef/chorizo) are readily available.

I have to say that my hostess here (whom I lived with in 2003) seems to be more into cooking than I remember. The macaroni and rice example does not do her justice. She has concocted some fine meals. Tonight, for example, black beans and rice (hardly a surprise) with a nice red cabbage salad that contained onions, cilantro, and carrots. It was lightly dressed in vinegar. She also made small hamburger patties (called tortas) seasoned with cilantro and onions. We also had a plate of tomatoes. Since I had walked several miles before dinner, I was excited by the feast that stood before me. I ate with much gusto.

Yesterday morning, she was up bright and early making potato empanadas, which I have to say, are probably my favorite thing she does. I ate three. Then I went out and walked 5 miles.
Now, about all this walking I have been doing. Let me explain. There are great places to walk here, and everyday I wake up the first thing I truly want to do after one cup of coffee is walk up to this one road that runs along a ridge line. It’s a haul. First, to get to the road you have to walk about a mile and half UP UP UP. You meander through the center of town, up to another community called San Luis and then you hit the gravel (mud road) that is just the best place in the world to walk. It’s hard to stop walking because the views from the ridgeline just keep getting better and better. One side of the ridge looks out at the great mountain called El Dragon, where Ancho and I once went walking with friends from our community. The other side looks down into Acosta and surrounding communities.

Because I am on country time, I can get up, walk for an hour and half or two hours, and get back to the house by 7 or 7:30. It’s a great way to start the day. Another perk about walking here, is that because I lived here before in 2003, I don’t have to start from scratch learning my way around.

So, as you can probably gage from this entry, I am happy to be in Acosta. It was hard to leave the community where I have spent the past year. I am consoling myself with the knowledge that I am going back there this coming weekend to spend the weekend with friends and to say good-bye. I thought it would be easier to say good-by without the added stress of packing up my house and waiting for a taxi.

Tomorrow, I am off to a meeting of agricultural producers in a nearby town. All this coming week, if I am a good girl, I will be hauling my fanny down into San Jose to do the last dregs of archival research duty. The week after, I am taking a short trip to Turrialba to visit an agricultural library there and meet some other folks from the states doing research in Costa Rica (anthropological and ecological).

In closing, I would like to give a big shout out to the UK football team who managed to win an SEC Homecoming game in a season they would probably all like to forget. It takes coconuts to keep trying in the face of severe adversity. And I think severe adversity is an apt descriptor for the UK football program this season. So anyway, good job. I tuned into to the last 2 minutes of the game on-line and was pleasantly surprise by the score. This talk of UK athletics makes it quite tempting to begin chatter about UK basketball, but I will save you all from such nonsense. I am just thankful I will be home for March Madness 2006. If you don’t understand why this makes me so happy, then you don’t really like college basketball.

I write this to you all (all five of you who read the blog) with much love,

Lefty