How To Travel Internationally
-wear the wonderful brightly colored socks Mom gave me for my birthday so when I go shoeless through security at least I can do so in style. I can look down and wiggle my toes and remember my mom and I on my porch taking pictures of our newly decked out feet
-make six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the hotel kitchen this morning even though there is no way I’ll eat them all in one day with out getting sick. Think about the past few weeks with the Queen of Thrift, Julia, and how she’d be proud.
-Listen to “Miss Otis Regrets” by Porter Project and try to remember what its like to listen to a song I love for the first time. Think again about my porch and sunsets in Monteverde.
-Send a silly Damn the Man email with curse words in it to Ji-Soo to pretend that me going to NYC to spend this summer with him ain’t no thang. Pretend that there is no belly butterfly ballet.
-Think about how Julia flew from Costa Rica to the USA just this morning and there is nothing to be nervous about. Wonder why the older I am the more anxious I get about travel.
Highlights From the This Trip to NYC
4:00 a.m. Sunday – wake up in Monteverde, shower, do last second cleaning and packing5:05 a.m. Sunday – leave the house tomeet the taxi in front of Hotel Villa Verde, dragging giant broken wheelie bag over rocks and through mud
5:15 – 6:05 a.m. Sunday – wait for bus to San Jose. Decide that plain yogurt with passion fruit is too bitter to be worth it. Dash to front of the line when we learn that there will be two bus loads worth on people on one bus because one bus broke down
6:10 a.m. – give up hard earned seat in the front of the bus to a woman with a one year old baby
6:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. – stand up on packed bus heading down the mountain in the rain. Try not to get scared of falling off cliffs. Try not to get car sick. Try to be helpful when the four-year-old girl in the seat next to me starts vomiting. Julia offered a plastic bag, I offered a bigger one. With holes in it. Oops. Note to self – sometimes helping is not that helpful
8:30 – 10:30 – ride to San Jose seated and in peace
10:30 – 1:00 – hang out in San Jose airport with Julia, Adam and Jessica until Adam and Jessica go to their flights and Julia and I grab a place to spend the night in Alajuela
5:00 p.m. Sunday – buy belt in Alajuela for 1,200 colones. Fall in love with it immediately. Reflect on my attachment to material possessions.
5:15 – 6:00 p.m. – Early dinner with Julia. Sit talking, sharing a plate of Chinese friend noodles, sipping Imperial. Try not to get involved with the waiter who tells me about how crazy it is that his white Costa Rican female friend married a black American. I fail, get yelled at, and leave, wondering why I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut.
6:00 p.m. Sunday – fall asleep face down on the bed with all my clothes on
7:00 p.m. Sunday – wake up, change
8:00 p.m. Sunday – go to bed for real, pajamas and all
12:00 a.m. Monday – wake up with a start when we hear what sounds an awful lot like six gunshots RIGHT OUTSIDE OUR WINDOW. Let me say a few words about where we spent the night: super clean, very affordable, bare bones. Part of bare bones means paper thing walls. So when you think someone might be shooting a gun right outside the door, being locked in your room does not make you feel any safer. I convince myself that it was not gunshots, just someone slapping mud off their shoes. Really hard. At midnight. I wait for my heart to stop pounding and start to drift off to sleep again only to hear a whisper from the other bed. “Ginna! Are you still awake? That was so sketchy!” I calm myself down, again, and fall into a nervous, shallow sleep.
3:00 a.m. Monday – Julia wakes up and gets ready to catch her early morning flight
4:00 a.m. Monday – We stand in the lobby waiting for Julia’s cab to the airport. In sleepy slow Spanish I ask the hotel manager, who called the cab for us,
“At around midnight we heard-“ he cuts me off by making two guns with his hands, throwing them above his head and going
“BAM! BAM! BAM!”
“You heard it too! Do you think it was gunshots?”
He looks at me calmly and says, “Of course it was. I went out back to check it out and could smell the gun powder.”
Awesome. And then Julia climbed into a cab and was gone and it was still 4 a.m. and I had to go back to bed alone in my paper and plywood fortress.
1:20 p.m. Monday – at the gate in San Jose. Ate two peanut butter sandwiches. Feel really full, but not too sick. Maybe I can eat six!
10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Brooklyn, NY - I never did eat more than two pb&j sandwiches. But they are in the fridge waiting for me!
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