¿A dónde voy de aquí?

Which brings me to today, hurrah! I went to yoga, went searching (unsuccessfully) for exercise pants and finally tried the popular brand of Costa Rica chocolate.

Yoga was intense. I can say now with certainty that the profuse sweating is due to the climate, because today the air was like a sauna. Right after I got home it poured, and then soon after cleared up and became sunny. I like how confused the weather is, just as long as I make it inside before it rains when I have electronics with me.

The exercise pants were interesting. I have never been a fan of white pants, but white pants specifically meant for exercising? Yeah, no thank you. I noted today during yoga that one of the participants had chosen white pants, and had also chosen to wear a thong because of how see-through they were. Ouch >.>; Even though I only have two pair of yoga pants, and one pair now has a hole in the butt, I think I can wait a little longer.

Shopping is pretty much the same here as it is at home, but I feel like there are more bag-checkers and bag check-in stations to prevent theft. The price tags were in dollars in one of the stores I visited, but the prices were indicated in colones (the currency here) on stickers and were about a third the price (which is strange, because I think many other shops are just the opposite with US vs. Costa Rica pricing). The shoe sizes only go up to size 9, and there are baaarely any there. The mannequins all have extravagant poses, huge breasts, erect nipples and junk in their trunks. Okay, now I see more differences.

The Costa Rican brand of chocolate is Gallito, and I think it’s like their version of Hershey’s. It’s what is popular, and what people eat. They make a ton of other candies, too, and I knew I liked those, so I decided it was only fair to give their chocolate a shot. Let’s just say, thankfully I found Lindt dark chocolate today at the store. It reminded me of those tiny, tin-foil wrapped balls of chocolate I would sometimes get on Halloween. I used it to make myself a mocha after trying it plain, but even then it could not be redeemed.

My tica mom has been trying really hard with my food lately, and I really appreciate it. Part of why I decided to buy the chocolate was because they were tiny, individually wrapped bars and I wanted to leave her a little present. I left it for her on her spot at the table to show my appreciation, and she later asked what it was and I told her it was for her. She then showed her appreciation by literally showing me the dinner she had left for me on the table, and I made sure to voice my approval. I think we’re starting to ‘get’ each other a little better now.


And now, a word from my pensive side.
I’m always learning here, whether it’s about my culture, their culture or myself and how I handle situations. Lately I’ve experienced moments of absolute clarity, of where I’m going, what I’m doing, my plan of action, and without a moment’s notice been thrust into a place either inside or outside of myself that is unbearably uncomfortable. It’s just like the love/hate relationship I have with the city, nothing can go too well, or too badly, for too long. This creates an interesting mindset, and I’ve caught myself in moments where all I can think of is home, and how this ‘life’ I have here is only temporary. I tell myself just to push through, and it will all be over soon and I can go back to my accustomed comforts. In this case, I just have to stop my train of thought and remember all the different things here that are good, and remind myself to take full advantage of the opportunities I have studying abroad (because I am extremely lucky to be here, and I will never have another chance to do what I am doing now). I have also caught myself feeling like a completely new person, either without any memories of friends and family, or with memories from a few years ago. This is always tricky, and I’m not sure why it happens, but it’s by far the strangest when I have teleported to the past and am unconsciously thinking about people who are no longer the same and feeling, to a certain degree, the same feelings I felt about them from that snapshot in time. I don’t know how I notice I’m doing it, but when I do I quickly regain all the memories between then and now and put myself back into college where I belong. I wonder if this is a side-effect of feeling dissociated from the world in which I’m living for a large part of the day, or if I’m just adjusting to a new way of thinking and feeling and somehow memories are getting mixed around.

My languages are definitely getting mixed around. I think in Spanglish, and end up conjugating Spanish verbs by only adding –ing or conjugating helping verbs and then finishing the thought in English. I’m tending to think in Spanish nouns, especially when it’s about something I have been mainly doing in Spanish (eating, classwork, planning), but it’s honestly a toss-up at this point. Sometimes I start to respond in English, even though I’ve been thinking in Spanish, and other times I drop in English words without noticing, such as ‘like’, ‘see’ and ‘well’. I just use ‘okay’ as a word because people get what it means, and I don’t feel that ‘está bien’ really has the same connotation as the form of ‘okay’ for ‘I’m listening and I understand’. I can tell my Spanish is worse after chatting with friends or sending e-mails in English, but I’m okay with that. I just need to find a TV show in Spanish and I could easily counter-balance the negative effects…if only entertainment was in Spanish here, and not just subtitled ;)

A strange decision with which I am faced is how hard I should push myself. After the crummiest day, when all I want to do is collapse and never speak Spanish again, one friendly conversation perks me back up. And, just when I feel my muscles are going to give out in yoga because I have gone past my physical capability, we switch positions and I can push on. I have never been the kind of person who could set up a schedule or set boundaries for myself (just ask my parents, it drove them crazy), yet somehow I always made it through. Now I figure it’s about time, but I don’t know where to start. What I DO know, though, is that this isn’t the place to do it. Ticos don’t seem to really have schedules, as you may have picked up by now, and stress as we know it in the US doesn’t exist here. People keep telling me ‘tranquila’ after I ask a question, or apologize for awkwardly getting in the way, or say thank you, and at first it really bothered me. I felt like they kept telling me to calm down, chill out, as if I were incredibly stressed. I realize now that even though I feel very calm here, I have still been nervous enough to be classified as stressed out for this culture. I can’t imagine throwing a tico into my high school during junior year, they could die just from overexposure to stress. I kid…mostly. The school pressure here just has a softer effect, and when my friends tell me that they were doing homework all night or all weekend, they look more sheepish and resigned to that fate than panicked. I might just be meeting the strange ticos, but I get the feeling that isn’t the case from the ‘pura vida’ vibe of Costa Rica. Even thinking that people were telling me to calm down was a result of my stress, I now realize. They were just telling me ‘don’t worry, be happy’.

I like those boundaries.