CUWinds Costa Rica

I was tricked into thinking this keyboard was an English keyboard but when I tried to insert a hyphen it gave me a comma and an underscore produced a question mark.

???

Anyways, before I dropped Philosophy of Everyday Life we had a brief discussion on what exactly a knickknack was.  Actually my philosophy teacher at a philosophy party had a philosophical discussion about the definition of a knickknack.  No conclusion was reached but I have titled this entry knickknacks because it will be a an assortment of thoughts that unfortunately cannot be grouped under a common theme, like my previous posts.  But please bear with me..

First: a continuation of the last post, on cultural points of interest.

Security: Crime in Costa Rica is nice in the sense that the majority of it is petty thievery.  I have been told by several sources that the reason why homicide is so prevalent in the United States is because of the large socioeconomic gaps that are present in small geographic locations (ie. a city).  Those gaps are not nearly as large nor as pervasive in this country.  I think the strife that such a gap presents is further eased by the fact that many of the very wealthy in this country are foreigners.  The two groups, rich and poor, are therefore incomparable since there are other criteria that often (but by certainly no means, always) separate the two.  In other words, it is easy for a poor Costa Rican to attribute wealth to the fact that the wealthy are foreigners, rather than to any other possible difference.  Being poor becomes much more bearable and there is little jealousy that arises as a result.

This is speculation, mind you, but the fact remains that most of the crime in Costa Rica revolves around stealing.

So because of this, all buildings have walls, barbed wire, or bars over the windows and doors to protect against thieves.  Many of the residential areas also have angry sounding, but relatively harmless, dogs.  It was very motivating to run up a steep hill at the end of our run in the mountains of San Isidro with a little dog quite literally nipping at our heels.

I think a lot of people were surprised by the amount of physical security, as it is often an indicator of poverty in the United States.  Having visited Sri Lanka and India several times though, I am not so much surprised by this but by the fact that the actual security guards (and police) are relatively useless.  I already mentioned how easily the police are bribed and if you talk to Garrett he will describe in great detail how unhelpful security guards are.

Churches: Like in many places in the world (notably Europe, in my experience) churches serve as the centerpieces of the towns in Costa Rica.  They are huge, beautiful, and not ornate but beautifully decorated.  Most memorably, the one in Santa Anna that we chanced upon while looking for a pulperia was a marvellous pink.

I have yet to decide how I feel about the fact that the local (I assume; I really have no idea) government allocates so much of their budget to building such exquisite churches when there are so many basic necessities that have yet to be fulfilled.  Of course religion for many is a basic necessity.  Regardless I still cannot see the logic behind prioritizing religion, which is nonessential to the physical functioning of your body, over food and clean water.  At any rate, I can admire at the very least that the people here love this one thing so much that they are willing to sacrifice certain essentials for it.  That is truly remarkable…

I think from here on out my points will become less cultural and more personal takes on my experience here.

Spanish: I took Spanish in high school and a little bit in college but have not touched it in the past year.  The first day in Poas was tricky and slightly disheartening because of the number of times I faltered or could not think of a word.  But after that, lots of it (minus some grammatical structures) came rushing back and I managed to trick some Costa Ricans into thinking I actually was of Spanish descent.  It is actually quite nice to come into a country and feel like a part of the majority, at least on appearance.  I cannot even have that feeling in India and Sri Lanka because I look so similar that my differences are much more striking.  I digress.

I am trying to figure out what age group is the easiest to understand.  In Argentina it was unquestionably the young kids, no more than 10 years old.  I interacted with very few children of that age, and the ones I did interact with did that cute little thing where they smile and hide behind their mothers’ legs.  I actually think the young teenagers were probably the most accepting of my terrible Spanish, the most willing to teach me the correct way, and were best able to discern what I was trying to communicate through my Spanglish.  They are however pretty difficult to understand because of their lack of enunciation.  I guess that’s a common feature of most cultures.

The adults and I would have conversations where the ideas were much more complicated than anything I have had experience with.  I found myself trying to ask whether Costa Rica’s investment in music would set the example for the rest of Latin America, for example…

By far the worst though were the old people (again, I suppose this is a common feature of all cultures).  I listened to a woman repeat herself over and over about how we should be on television and whether Graham was recording us for the TV and I explained to her again and again what the situation was.  That was probably the most lucid conversation I had.  Most of the others comprised of me shouting DISFRUTO AL CONCIERTO???? to no avail.  It was hilarious.  It’s even more amusing because it looks like I’m saying I enjoy the concert but I can’t find the accent for the O.  Or really any punctuation mark.  Like quotation marks…

Music: How could I go an entire twelve without talking about the reason why we’re all here?

Firstly a word on the fact that very few of us are music majors.  One of the first things I talked about with the couple I was sitting in between on the plane (I felt like an adopted child – the woman wanted to sit by the woman and the man preferred the aisle seat) asked whether there were any engineers in the band.  HA.

But it is, actually, remarkable that so few of us are music majors yet we value music so highly that we come to this trip and do what we do purely for its sake without any sort of academic compensation.  Other comparable universities do not have such programs and I will be completely presumptious in saying that it is because of a lack of that sort of mentality.  Word up, Cornell.

I am getting tired of typing but I will end this by saying that I think the most valuable, or at least my favorite part of this trip was the conducting master class in Pavas.  It very much fits the proverb that if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day but if you teach him how to fish he will eat for a lifetime.  Similarly we impact exponentially the music programs by teaching others how to teach.  I wish we as an ensemble could be a larger part of that idea instead of merely the guniea pig but guniea pigs are valuable.  Just look at all the research that we do with the rodent family.

Now I’m thinking about schizophrenia so I should probably end this here.  There is an open air market that is begging for exploration…

Iona Machado

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.