In case you were worried, I went to check for you: Barrio Escalante is still here.
The eastern San José neighborhood that constitutes Costa Rica’s hipster capital is quieter and very masked than usual (I can’t resist giving Saúl some product placement here, because – well, who can resist a masked zebra?). But man, it feels good to stretch your legs on those sidewalks. It feels good to buy something, ever so carefully, thinking to yourself, “We’re OUT in the WORLD!” In my case, it was a pastry at Franco and a bar of Sibú Chocolate and a few books at the Librería Francesa, which looks out onto an empty, closed-off Parque Francia. I cast plenty of wistful gazes at the mostly-empty restaurants.
The small businesses of Escalante, like others around the country, are hanging in there and waiting for us. Whenever we can get there. They hope it’s soon.
I’m lucky to have been able to work from home – so, so lucky – but boy, have I missed chepeando, that perfect word that describes the experience of being out and about in San José. It’s a troubled city, but with so many hidden marvels, all of them best experienced on foot.
I hope we’re never separated from it for quite this long again.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; learn how to join my Overwhelmed Writers’ League, every Saturday at 1 pm EST; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! To learn more about how to support Costa Rica during the crisis, visit my COVID-19 section – or for ways to enjoy Costa Rica from afar, visit Virtual Costa Rica.
Today’s a day of few words, but a lovely image by Gianfranco Vivi: a sunset over Moravia, in San José.
What’s your favorite spot for sunset-watching in Costa Rica? Mine is the beach at Esterillos or Bejuco on the Central Pacific coast, for sentimental reasons, but I’m not particular. It’s absurdly beautiful from wherever you may be.
I hope you get a chance to see the sunset today.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! If you want to learn more about how to support Costa Rica during the crisis, visit my COVID-19 section, updated regularly – or for ways to enjoy Costa Rica from afar, visit Virtual Costa Rica.
I’m getting today’s post in under the wire – and since night has fallen, I’m using this Daily Boost to say thank you to Chepecletas, which has made nighttime explorations of San José fun and accessible to so many people. Champions of cycling and walking in the crowded capital, the folks at ChepeCletas organize fun “safaris,” many at night, to showcase the city’s history, gastronomy, nightlife and arts. Plus, their social media feeds are full of news, events and cool photos like the one I’m resharing here.
Their next safari is Thursday, Jan. 30. Check it out here – and here’s to showcasing a city too many people dismiss.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
If you’ve driven into San José from the east or wandered the mean streets of Barrio California, you’ve definitely seen Quiero Más, the artesanal pasta shop with a portly man on the sign. We stopped in yesterday during a walk, and I was reminded of what it’s like to buy food from someone who is truly passionate about it. A food nerd, if you well. A food artist.
As I walked up to the counter in the tiny shop, my husband had asked for some fresh ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese, and he was already deep into a conversation with the friendly don Luis, who was listening to my husband’s plans for the ravioli and offering additional ideas. “I’m just giving you alternatives,” he said, careful not to step on a customer’s culinary toes. “But if you put them in soup, ahhh, the flour in the ravioli thickens the broth and…” His smile finished his sentence for him. He happily showed us the empanada wrappers he sells – I learned a new word, tapas, the squares of pastry dough you can buy fresh and then just spoon in your filling – as well as the spinach lasagna noodles, the ribbons of tagliatelle. The list goes on.
Don Luis wrapped up the ravioli in paper, as carefully as if they were a Christmas present. Because of this, we received it reverently and carried it with great care through the rest of our day, even though normally pasta is something we would sling into a supermarket cart and then onto a pantry shelf. It was the same feeling you get when you leave a farmer’s market bearing tomorrow’s papaya like a treasure.
I’ll be back to Quiero Más, because, well, I want more. So should you, if you live around here and love pasta. But my visit also reminded me of something bigger: that while some of us are trying to go back to small, simple, homemade and local, there are people like the folks at Quiero Más who never left. Here’s to all the people who were on the train of small family businesses, artisanal food processes, organic ingredients and exquisite specificity, long before the rest of us emerged from globalized superstores craving exactly those things. Here’s to shops like this one that have somehow kept their doors open through decades of change, recessions and crises, and the crime spoken to by the barbed wire above the door. Here’s to the don Luises of the world who transform our dinner into an experience that shapes our whole day – conoisseurs of the art of food.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
One of the best possible ways to spend a long, breezy San José afternoon in December is to wander through the city’s prettiest parks, nestled together just east of the city center: Parque Nacional, Parque Morazan and especially Parque España. And now there’s a delightful spot to stop, browse and read amidst the green.
Librería Duluoz is just off the Parque España’s northeast corner, across a narrow street from the beautiful Casa Amarilla. On a recent visit, I could have plopped down in the cozy, inviting kids’ section for hours. The English-language selection is limited, but readers of Spanish will be in heaven, and honestly, it’s worth a visit just for its gorgeous location. Robust feminist and LGBTQ sections and more provide a chance to take in the scope of the country’s and region’s progressive authors, and independent publishers are the stars of the show.
I’m glad Librería Duluoz has joined Librería Andante on the extremely nascent independent bookstore crawl I started as part of the Daily Boost. Do you have other favorites I should visit? Tell me all about them! And don’t forget to enter my Costa Rican holiday care package giveaway!holiday care package giveaway!
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
I only found her Instagram account a few days ago, but I’m already figuring out which corner in my house will belong to Carolina Rodríguez of ChepeArt.
San José is a marvelous city wrapped in a thick layer of crud. It frustrates me almost every day, and yet I feel more at home walking down Avenida Central in a crowd of people than in any other place on the planet. Yup, right about here.
Rodríguez’s images wipe away the worst struggles of the city and show off the iconic structures and places that make us proud to be josefinos. Somehow, the scrubbly look of her prints captures the imperfect nature of the scenes, such as this one featuring the public phones downtown that I used to search for a job during my first days in Costa Rica in 2004. (Yes. With a phone card. As my daughter says, “Those were days of yore.”) This was my office:
If you, too, love this city, follow Rodríguez on Facebook or Instagram – where you can also see the places where her work is displayed or for sale – and you’ll get a little happy boost of colorful Chepe whenever you need one.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
Costa Rica is one big invitation to stop multitasking, but San José is all about it. This is partly because of all the traffic. How are you not going to distract yourself with your phone while on a bus for two hours or sitting motionless in a car?
Yesterday I announced triumphantly to my husband that I had written 3,500 words of my novel on the way home. He looked appropriately alarmed. I explained I had just turned on voice-to-text and narrated aloud, producing such sentences as “She miss being and not T cozies” but capturing a huge chunk of action nonetheless.
Somehow this morning, while thoroughly distracted, I stumbled on this six-year-old piece by a young mother that says it all. I never had a moment of panic the way she did, but I think most parents today have experienced that panic in smaller ways, which is why her piece resonated so much: it’s the panic of that sudden return to the self, the kid tugging on your sleeve, the “Why am I even doing this right now?” mini-epiphany that fades away the next time technology beckons. We think that something needs to be done now, and it doesn’t. Our kids, who are always now, get less of us as a result.
I don’t think that’s always so bad. It’s fine for kids to be ignored sometimes: it balances out some of our weird helicopter-parenting era and gives them some time and space to create cool things. Sometimes, when I’m busy and my daughter wails, “I’m bored!” I even smile to myself, knowing that with luck, this declaration means that thirty seconds later I’ll find her immersed in an amazing game of her own creation. Only we, the parents, know the difference – the difference between insisting on five more minutes to finish writing something that really matters to me, and half-listening to her story because I’m dealing with some work email that no one even expects me to answer til the morning.
Has anyone out there, reading this, found ways to become one-taskers more often? I have a very pretty Phone Box that I need to dust off and start to use again, but I’d love to hear other ideas. Most of all, I hope to listen a bit more to the rest of Costa Rica, the land that lies outside these city limits, full of places that call to all of us to do only one thing at a time.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
Can you name the Costa Rican park where I took this photo? Do you have a favorite – national, city, private? Dog park (man, I know a nice one in Eastport, Maine)? Random-corner-that-isn’t-technically-a-park-but-makes-you-happy? I’ve been collecting parks in Costa Rica for 15 years, and there are few habits that have done more for my mental health than those escapes, no matter how short.
If you can, wherever you are today, drop by a park and take a break. Because sometimes, #travelthursday is just that simple.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
Dear Small Busy Person: It’s typical of parenthood that one of the reasons I started this project was to mark my ten-year anniversary in Costa Rica, but the date itself blew by in a bleary-eyed blur three months ago and I never posted what I had written about it. But you’re asleep now, with Minnie Mouse under one arm and Little Duck under the other, so I’d better get it out before ten years becomes twenty.
Ten years ago today, I sat on an airplane listening to the “all right” chorus of Float On by Modest Mouse, and hoping it would be. All right, that is. In the belly of the plane just beginning to break through the clouds, revealing the damp green valley below, was a suitcase holding some clothes, two paperback books, and a few other sundries. The damp green valley held no reliable work prospects and only a temporary place to leave through a former colleague. For once in my life, I had no idea what I was doing. Continue reading Ten Years of Fig Trees (el antiguo higuerón)
I am terrible with directions. I am so terrible that, one morning during my visit to Costa Rica as a college student – the same morning that I managed to get my sneakers stolen and sold back to me by the same enterprising thief on the beach at Jacó – I had actually gotten up early to run and watch the sunrise. As the sky slowly lightened over the ocean and the sun failed to appear, a similarly gradual enlightenment took place in my top-notch brain. I realized I was on the Pacific coast, looking west, and that the sunrise might best be contemplated on the other side of the country; this was a place I might someday visit, if I could ever get my shoes back. Did I say “terrible with directions”? I believe it might be more accurately translated as “más tonta que las gallinas de noche” – “dumber than hens at night.”
At any rate, you won’t be surprised to learn that it took me nearly ten years to realize the orientation of our house. I was outside with you a couple of months ago, watching the sun set beyond our gate, when it occurred to me that my favorite spot, the back corner where I sit at night as you fall asleep, is also our northernmost corner. It is the place where I read you Pat the Bunny or Baby Listens, then pull out my own book, and read, and wait. From our armchair, I can look out over the whole quiet length of our little house. Over the sound of your little noise machine, just enough to mask throaty motorcycle engines and loudmouthed neighbors, I can still hear the crickets outside or, one evening during Lent, a somewhat toneless but oddly beautiful chorus of old ladies at the stations of the cross I’d seen them putting up earlier in the day, their dutiful sons and husbands following the women’s orders as usual in the gated porches and entryways of our neighborhood.
I sit like this until you’re fast asleep, eyelashes lushly curved against your cheek, hands curled. Some nights, it’s not that simple (look in the index under “crankiness,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians reruns,” “begging” or “maniacal laughter”), but when it is, it’s the most peaceful, quiet, and happy moment of my day, my week, my life.
Our northern corner.
So I was thrilled to discover that when I sit in that armchair, I am at the northernmost point of our house, looking south. It makes sense. It means I’m sitting as close as I possibly can to the place I’m from. I sit as close as I can to long, shadowed summer evenings made for the far-off sound of a tennis-ball thwack or the swoosh of a net, to bare feet on cedar chips in my mother’s garden where I fill my outstretched T-shirt with arugula leaves and butter beans. I sit as close as I can to autumn, crisp leaves on top and muddy below, scuffed up by age-old Bean boots my thrifty father keeps resoling. I sit as close as I can to winter, to red, numb legs after a run, to dark mornings that I don’t miss in the least, to muted heather sunsets that I miss terribly. I sit as close as I can to spring, to the joy of the first bare leg and the first sandal, even when you realize halfway out the door that you jumped the gun and are freezing cold. I sit as close as I can to the seasons of an earlier life, seasons that now pass without me, and I feel a little acabangada – the Costa Rican word for the particular melancholy of missing a person after a breakup, or an animal that has died, or a place. (You can also estar de cabanga or, the best, tener un cabangón, a serious nostalgia attack that in my world would require a box of wine and a rainy window to gaze through.)
But the cabangón is not for me, not tonight. I sit in the north corner, knowing that at my back, behind the window and the neighbor’s flower-covered wall and the streets and tin roofs beyond; behind the Nicaraguan border where ladies in frilly aprons sing about the cheeses they have to sell; behind all the borders after that, the state lines, the rivers and lakes and ocean waves of increasing frigidity; behind me, way behind me, is the life I left, but before me, to the south, is the life I came to find. Before me, to the south, is the land where the streets have no name or logical layout, where rain falls in sheets, where MacGyver is a noun used in daily conversation, and where I have so often found myself “a lo chancho chingo” – as happy as a naked pig.
At any rate, for now, none of it matters, none of what’s behind or before us. Because for now, for right now, the only latitude and longitude that matters are the degree, minute, second, and circle of lamplight that hold the two of us together. That’s why I linger so long. That’s why I take my time setting you down. I want to delay the moment when thought resumes. I want to delay the moment when the lamp goes out. I want to delay the moment when the armchair creaks goodnight, the northern corner empties, the bedroom door closes, my feet take me back into the world, the world begins to move once more.
katherine stanley obando 