Tyler Sprecker

Tyler Sprecker

Living abroad in Costa Rica:

As I approached graduation my final year of college I was confronted with a very important decision: what to do with myself. I hadn’t lined up a job like some of my classmates, nor had I applied to graduate school like a few others. With no real prospects lined up, I decided to take the time to see another part of the world and improve my Spanish. After reviewing several programs I settled on a language school in Costa Rica.

Aside from a skiing trip in Canada and a couple of cruises in the Western Caribbean, I had never been outside the US before. I knew I wanted to travel and see other cultures but I was not entirely sure what to expect. I didn’t do much research on Costa Rica prior to my departure, either (I think my mom did more research than I did). All I knew was what everyone else did: Costa Rica had nice beaches and rain forests. For all the research I did, watching one episode of National Geographic would have better prepared me for my journey.

There are certain luxeries that many of us as Americans have come to expect as part of our living arrangements. A few days without power after a lightening storm becomes more than an inconvenience. If one of our computers breaks down on us, raplacing it becomes our top priority. As an American, I had become accustomed to a certain standard of living that is not enjoyed by many others outside the developed world. I won’t compare my time in Costa Rica to my friend’s experience volunteering in Niger, but living with a family of modest means in Costa Rica was an adjustment.

Luckily the family I was living with had electricty and running water, usually. Occassionally during the rainy season the power would go out for a few hours or a few days, and along with it, the water. The few times that my family was able to foresee the large storms they would fill up buckets with water so we would have something to bath with while the water was out. The power outages weren’t the problem, though; it was the cold showers. I grew up going fishing and camping, so I like to think I can tolerate some pretty extreme conditions, but in my day to day life hot showers is where I draw the line. Unfortunately, I was forced to adapt, but I was not enthusiastic about having to do so. The cold showers were nice mid-day during the summer when it was so hot and humid outside that walking to the pool was almost too great a burden, but cold showers in the morning were significantly less welcome. The shower situation was something I did not discover until the morning after my arrival, but my adjustment began the night before.

Waiting in the bathroom to welcome me the night of my arrival was a cockroach. Having had been to New York and Washington DC, I had seen cockroaches, but not like the ones I would learn to live with in Costa Rica. The Costa Rican variety were bigger than the ones I had previously been acquainted with. My host family had insect spray that was rather effective at killing the cockroaches, so managing the cockroach problem was not especially taxing on my sensibilities. Much to my dismay, however, dead cockroaches were quickly replaced with live ones. They were pretty good at finding hiding places as well, as I discovered the hard way. One day, I was brushing my teeth and was about to spit into the sink when a cockroach climbed up out of the drain as soon as I turned on the faucet. Perhaps even cleverer was the one I discovered a short while later. On the sink was one of those plastic tooth brush holders with slots for the tooth brushes and a hollow underside. I discovered a cockroach had claimed the underside as its home when I saw the cockroach’s antennae sticking out from underneath.

The cockroaches were just the beginning of my insect worries, however. Directly above the bed in my room was a light that would attract various insects (mostly small beetles). The insects would collect on the light and then fall onto my bed, requiring me to sweep off the top sheet before going to sleep each night. At least the ones that managed to find their way into my bedroom were usually not large enough to cause much alarm. The larger wasps and moths tended to confine themselves to the living room.

You may be wondering why so many insects managed to find their way into the house in the first place. The answer is simple: they did not have screens on their windows and doors, all of which were left open during the day to air out the house. As they had a television set and the father had a cell phone, I could only imagine that they had enough money to get screens if they felt it was necessary, but for them it wasn’t a problem. They had grown up that way and were more accustomed to insects around the house than I was. They even had a solution: geckos. Crawling on the walls of the kitchen and living room (and occasionally, my room) were geckos which fed on the insects. Aside from their evening chirps I did not find them to be a nuisance, and seeing as how they fed on the insects I disdained, I counted them among my Costa Rican friends.

The insects are something you learn to live with. I was considerably more squeamish about them when I arrived than when I left five and a half months later. Likewise, I had learned to live with cold showers in the morning. It was an adjustment – one of many – that I would have to make during my time in Costa Rica.

Sugar Beach, Costa Rica (from personal collection)

Aside from the issues described in my previous article my experience in Costa Rica was rather enjoyable.

My host family lived in a small town off the coast of Potrero Beach, about a 40 minute walk along the bay from Flamingo Beach where I attended the Centro Panamericano de Idiomas. The town itself was rather simple: a soccer field, two supermarkets and two bars/restaurants. My house was located about a ten minute walk outside of town, about 100 meters past an excellent Italian restaurant called Marco Polo. Every morning a small school bus would meet me and a few other students outside the restaurant to take us to school.

Village life pretty much revolved around school events, which consisted of the occasional school dance or parade. Select days throughout the year (such as Mothers Day) featured school parades across the country. Not even the language school escaped the festivities. Once a month the school had “Cultural Events” that required the participation of all students. Events included plays, music, poem recitals and dances (yours truly acted as one of the wise men in a nativity play, participated in an arts and crafts fair and recited original poetry).

There was one event that did not involve the local schools, however. Every Wednesday night, the best bar in town had ladies' night where the women drank free. In a town with nothing else to do after the sun went down, ladies' night was a popular event. In my five and a half months I attended exactly two ladies' nights, and if you ask me, it was two too many. The man to woman ratio was about 14:1. All the local women knew better than to go, which left mostly female students from the language school looking to have a good time. If I were a woman I can’t imagine I would have gone more than once just to see what it was like. Most of the men there would get drunk and watch the people on the dance floor. I know several women that tried dancing but quickly left the floor after being groped repeatedly. Aside from the “hands on” dancing, however, I am not aware of anyone having had any problems.

Although the night life was somewhat relaxed during the week, there were plenty of ways to stay occupied. As I mentioned, the beach was only a ten minute walk from my house, and although Potrero Bay was nothing to write home about, it bordered some more attractive beaches with whiter sands and bigger waves. Most days a group of students would meet at the beach or one of the nearby pools. Students that wanted to escape for a while could take the bus to one of the nearby towns. Tamarindo, a touristy city along the beach with rows of shops and restaurants, was only 40 minutes by bus. The school also offered various day or weekend trips for an additional expense, such as trips into the rain forest, a nearby nature preserve and nearby cities.

Perhaps most fun of all, however, was just hanging around with the other students. During my tenor at the school, I met other students from France, England, Ireland, Brazil, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Canada, the United States, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and Switzerland, all with their own experiences, perspectives and reasons for learning Spanish. I had a lot of good times with the some of the people I met while I was there, but I’ll save those stories for Part 3.

alled Mariner’s Inn, a place I would later rely upon for an after class banana split everyday like clockwork, an addiction matched only by my reliance on the school’s coffee, which served a double purpose: satisfying my palate and keeping me awake. At my peak I was consuming about six cups over the course of the four-hour school day, though my coffee regime was later pared back.

The day that Katrina left was a sad one. Not long after her departure, however, I began spending time with a young guy that had recently finished his army service after 18 months in Afghanistan. Quiet by nature, getting details about his time overseas was a bit like getting a politician to admit he was wrong about something, though he indulged me a few stories, one of which stands out among the rest.

Among the ranks of the animal kingdom in Afghanistan is the camel spider, a spider that can reach the size of a dinner plate. One fine day my friend and his unit were out for a patrol in their humvees using a dried riverbed as a road, when one of the humvees drove over a camel spider. After the humvee had passed, the spider then picked itself up and scuttled out of the river bed. I cringed at the thought of an indestructible spider-monster lurching in the shade. Luckily for me I was on the other side of the world, where my biggest problem was grasshopper-like insects one foot in length; scary in its own right, but better than robo-spider.

I made my next group of friends with two months left to go: an affable woman from Denver named Nancy, a man between careers from South Carolina named Grant, a recent Oxford graduate named Emily, and a dance instructor from Germany named Stefanie (who, oddly enough, didn’t have a German accent). The four of us took to spending time at the pool, eating at Marco Polo and hanging around on the porch of Grant’s duplex. Time slowed down after Katrina had left, yet it managed to pick up again after these four arrived. Despite our day to day shenanigans I think our most memorable time together was our trip into Santa Cruz for Costa Rica’s Christmas parade. One of the others rented a car for the day and the five of us made the leisurely drive into Santa Cruz. After accessorizing ourselves with Santa hats (or devil horns, in Stefanie’s case) we made our way through the throngs of people to watch the parade. Thousands of people crowded the streets that night; street vendors lined the streets selling confetti and food and beverages. It was a good way to celebrate our approaching departure dates.

The friends I made in Costa Rica alone made the trip worthwhile. Fortunately, my friends were not limited to the students I met, a topic for Part 4.

Living abroad in Costa Rica: Part 4

While most of my friends were fellow class mates of mine, one of my closest friends I made in Costa Rica was a local. Although originally from Nicaragua Nelson, like thousands of his fellow Nicaraguans, had come to Costa Rica in search of work. While most of them took advantage of the boom in Costa Rica’s tourism industry by signing up for jobs in construction, Nelson was a security guard for a nearby compound of duplexes. Nelson was my age, and had a great sense of humor. While he had a great desire to learn English, his schedule did not permit him to take advantage of free classes offered by a hotel located not far outside of town. To compensate, he would write down random English words he had heard and later ask me to translate them. This practical if inefficient system often yielded some interesting words, such as “caboose” and “string cheese.” I would often visit with Nelson in the evenings and accompany him on his patrols around the two compounds for which he was responsible. My conversations with him probably did more to improve my Spanish than anything else I did there, and given our similar goals to learn a foreign language, laughing at each other for our failures of communication was almost mandatory. Of course, Nelson wasn’t the only local I befriended.

Like all students that stayed longer than a week, I had my favorite teachers (students were given new teachers weekly). Since I was there for so long I had the opportunity to be taught by nearly every teacher on the school’s roster (the only reason why I didn’t have every teacher at least once is because eventually I was allowed to choose my teachers). Mario, without a doubt my favorite teacher of the bunch, was in his late twenties/early thirties, very laid back and loved to have a good time. He had attended college for eco-tourism, a subject he was delighted to speak about. He was also very fond of cooking. He was always sharing with me recipes of his, including one for turtle eggs. As Mario explained to me, although it is illegal to poach turtle eggs, they would often times find their way onto the market after being confiscated from poachers by the police. He also took me hunting for scorpions one day after learning that I had not seen one in my (then) five months in Costa Rica (we found one under a log in the school yard). Mario was something of a rarity among his fellow Costa Ricans as he also spoke English and Italian (although the region of Costa Rica in which I was living was home to a large Italian community that shared that particular linguistic trifecta).

Also among my favorites was Lorena, a motherly figure in her mid-twenties. She was a very kind and light-hearted person and was more than happy to share with me various ghost stories from her childhood. A friend and colleague of hers, Marionella, was another one of my favorites. Fun and easy to talk to, Marionella stood out among her fellow Costa Ricans for her dancing in a country whose culture is strongly tied to music and dance. Every week day for four hours I would sit down with my teachers and review verbs, discuss sentence structure, summarize news paper articles and talk about whatever came to mind. Naturally my favorite teachers were the easiest and most interesting to talk to. For those that needed assistance inspiring conversation among their students, various tools were employed.

As I discovered, asking students their opinions about controversial topics was often the most effective way to get them talking. During my first few weeks of school, I was surprised to be asked by some of my teachers about my views regarding abortion and the war in Iraq. Given the complexities of such issues, I did not feel I had an adequate grasp of the language to discuss them. It felt strange to be asked such questions at first. Only after it became obvious that such questions were merely used to initiate discussions did I feel comfortable talking about them. I was surprised to see that while many of my teachers had their own strongly held views about such issues, they had no difficulty listening to others express theirs. Whether that ability to listen to others was a special talent learned by language teachers or more broadly a characteristic of Costa Ricans I am still not sure, but it was something to be admired.

My other major point of contact with the Costa Rican people was, of course, my host family. While many of my friends did not particularly like their host families, I somehow managed to win the host family lottery. They were a young family that was quick to accept me as part of the group. The father, Ignacio, was an English teacher for two elementary schools. Although our day-to-day conversations were always in Spanish, having an English speaker in the house proved to be invaluable the few times I became sick, for which I was taken into Santa Cruz for a blood analysis on one occasion. The mother, Yorleni, was an Ama de Casa (stay-at-home mom). She was shy but very kind, as I was told is often the case with Costa Rican women. Their oldest child Lauren lived with her grandparents an hour away in Santa Cruz during the school year, though she would return during her breaks. At 13 years of age, she remains one of the most mature people I have ever met and without a doubt the most mature for her age. As far as I could tell she was an adult living in a child’s body. And finally, the youngest child Ignacio, at five years of age, was one part curiosity and two parts trouble. As if to provide a counter-weight to his sister’s unnatural level of maturity, Ignacio was seemingly mischievous beyond his years. By way of introduction, he punched one of my class mates in the groin that had dropped by to say hello. I would also find him urinating off the porch from time to time, as if taking four steps into the bathroom was too large a burden for his small bladder to bear. And as I recall, my words of advice to him in my departing letter were not to bite people so often (I had the honor of bearing his teeth marks on my back after accepting what I erroneously thought was a simple hug from behind).

Little Ignacio notwithstanding, my host family was terrific. They were very accommodating and more than willing to explain things to me. Yorleni’s parents lived in the house next door, and two houses down lived her sister, a living arrangement that is quite common in much of Costa Rica. They were all frequent visitors to the house and very kind people.

I was fortunate to have met the people I did. My experience in Costa Rica would have been much less memorable without them.