Well, first post in a while, actually the first time I´ve been online since the day after christmas. I left Heredia for the fourth to last time on the morning of the 27th for the beaches around this pueblo on the Nicoya peninsula called Nosara. The people on the bus played a favorite Costa Rican bus game called Let´s See How Many Screaming Children We Can Pack Onto This Piece. At one point earlier that morning a woman gave the lady selling tickets a sheepish, apologetic look as she asked for 1 ticket, please. I know this, because she gave me the exact same look on the bus as she indicted that the window seat next to me belonged to her. And her big christmas bag. And her child. I couldn´t translate ´What the hell do you think you´re doing with all that?´ fast enough, and pretty soon her, her two sacks, and some white kid were squeezed into a couple seats. Her kid was nice, though, and didn´t cry, which is lucky for her because if it did I would have thrown it out the window into oncoming traffic. I ended up standing most of the ride anyway, and since you can´t read while standing on those buses I listened to cds and thought of how much cooler What´s Eating Gilbert Grape? would have been if they would have cast Arnold Swarzenegger as the retarded little brother hiding in trees and yelling ´Where´s Arnie? Where´s Arnie?´ He probably would have killed Johnny Depp when he jumped out of the tree, but that wouldn´t have stopped him from climbing the water tower again and clandestinely eating that birthday cake. He still wouldn´t have gotten out of the tub, either.
The pueblo of Nosara is about five kilometers from the beach and I stayed the first night on the porch of some ticos I´d met on the bus. they were good people and we stayed up very late and they taught me more Costa Rican slang, like how the spanish equivalent of Dickface is a high compliment amongst them. The next morning I found out how far from the beach we actually were and later that afternoon packed my things and bid them farewell to find Vince who was to be somewhere along playa Guillones surfing and living in a tent. The first beach I was at was playa Pelada, and it wasn´t very big, so I assumed finding Vin wouldn´t be too hard since how big could Guillones be, anyway? This part of the peninsula is very underdeveloped due to a very powerful residents association in the area full of mainly retirees and expats from the US who have won many legal battles to keep out large scale development. anyway, playa Guillones was fucking huge as shit like you couldn´t believe, it just went on forever and in a second I knew my chances of finding my friend from Yakima were nil. it´s okay though, he´s coming to Chile with me in a week or so. I slept that night on the beach and was able to cover up all of myself from the bugs except for my hands. when I woke up they were covered with bug bites that are just now going away. it sounds bad, but at least I didn´t encounter the vicious botfly that likes to lay its larvae under your skin and create what appears to be the most gnarly zit ever. You don´t want to know what happens after that.
So the third day I walked and hitched my way down the coast back to Playa Samara where I was at the beginning of this month with Zach one of the Boise heads. Him and the other member of the B team Tim were back there too, living in this shack for free because they were helping the owner to fix it up. The owner runs a camping area, 4 dope ass cabinas, and a restaurant, and his name is Joel. Joel is awesome. He´s around 50, smokes buckets of pot, and married a 23 year old Costa Rican a couple weeks ago. Zack and Tim were at the service and told me it was very nice. So I stayed with them my last night, it´s the 3rd time we´ve bid each other farewell and still probably isn´t the last, but that´s okay. The bus ride back to San Jose from the beach was a nightmare, all full like John Wayne´s colon and I had to sit in the exit stairwell at the back of the bus, listening to cds and reading because I could. I finished For Whom The Bell Tolls, what a great story, Papa knew how to write ´em. I stayed that night in that dope little hostel in San Jose where I was for christmas eve but was too tired to mingle with all the brits and frenchies. Before I crashed however I was watching a spot of telly and this french girl was asking me if I knew of a show called ´Friends´ which of course I told her I didn´t. Then I looked at her boyfriend and holy shit he was Ben Stiller´s exact double, glasses and everything. I´ve seen people who´ve looked like people before, but this was ridiculous. I listened to him speak french for five minutes and still wasn´t entirely convinced that it was wasn´t really Ben Stiller. Then I went to bed, having spent far too much time thinking about it.
So I got the hell out of San Jose/Heredia for the 3rd to last time yesterday morning, which means that right now I´m in an internet cafe in the cool little town of Granada, Nicaragua. Last night I was kicking it with some Canadians (Why are they always Canadians? Where did they all come from?) for new years and watching 2 Germans unload an incredible amount of fireworks onto the street in front of the hostel/restaurant. One of the Quebekers was named Francoise and he told me neat stories about protests he´d been involved in in Quebec City. One, of course, was the Evil World Financial Emperors meeting, but the really interesting one he told me about was this one where the very powerful Canadian Jewish community who owns a bunch of shit invited the former Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to one of their big fancy meetings and Francoise and 400 or so other people created such a disturbance that Netanyahu´s bodyguards decided it was too dangerous for him to try to make it through. Apparently that was the first time that evil bastard wasn´t able to make an engagement to speak, so hats off to those Canadians, a number of whom were later expelled from school by the dean of a Quebec university who was waiting to hear Netanyahu speak.
We found ourselves sitting in the park a little later and one of the Quebekers had a guitar. He saw me eyeing it and handed it to me and I proceded to dick around on a guitar for the first time in a long time and it felt so incredibly good to play and I was feeling chills because I miss my guitar so much. I just played scales and the two Modest Mouse song intros I know and promised myself that a guitar is absolute top priority when I land in Santiago.
So I land in Santiago a week from tomorrow at 330 in the morning. Tomorrow I´m taking the ferry to the other island called Soletiname that nobody I know has been to, which is probably why I´m going. I´ll make it to Ometepe another time. Back into Costa Rica on the 5th or 6th, finalize my ticket and repack, then say goodbye to Heredia for the second to last time. The last comes next July, when I have one night there to spent at my favorite bar before flying back to the states the next day. Next July. I like the sound of that.