Wrong-footing Around

1Mar10

Wrong-footing around.

Came into San Jose, Costa Rica, near midnight night before last.  To bed at the Hampton Inn.  Slept like a log.  Awakened by telephone. The delivery of my little 4X4, rented for the entire 4 weeks. 

Everything is out of balance.  My Spanish sucks.  My sense of what the hell I am doing is very unfocused.  Bad combination.

Just a scant week before coming here, out of the blue, I got an email from the Costa Rican fellow who was so instrumental in organizing a travel course I co-taught here 4 or 5 years ago.  It was an intensive 3-week course with 13 students; TONS of logistics, a half-dozen different places we bused or floated to.  It was really cool, but also very hard work, and I vowed never to do it again unless someone else did ALL the organizing.  I even told Jose as much.

So literally days before I was to come to Costa Rica, and literally years since we last corresponded, Jose sends me an email, completely out of the blue, telling me he is ready to call my bluff and organize a travel course from top to bottom.  I write back and say I’ll be there in a couple of days, can we meet.

Yesterday, Jose swept into the lobby of the Hampton Inn, and escorted me back into the real Costa Rica.  The epitome of Costa Rica is that nobody uses street names.  They use landmarks.  Addresses are simply a hierarchical series of landmarks.  Very confusing.  Very wrong-footed.  Especially for an entity such as Google Earth!  When I looked up Hampton Inn on Google earth, I found no less than half a dozen in the airport area alone!  Which one was I in?!

Of course, I neglected to consider that Google Earth could get anything wrong.  That the descriptive algorithm of landmarks means ambiguity, a quality that makes computer algorithms burn up.  There is only one Hampton Inn near the airport.

Jose got there early.  He came with his sister and her husband.  We reminisced and gossiped in the lobby, and Jose recommended a good side-trip to one of the volcano rain-forests, and even called a local lodge there.  He was about to send me on my way, when I said, whoa.  I want to see your new school!  Cmon, Jose.  Let’s go see it. 

Wrong-footed in the right direction.