091309 Sunday, 6:30am

09.13.09 Sunday, 6:30am

SYNOPSIS: Salsa dancing, Machismo, another cultural faux paus, a sunny day at the beach, cell phone problems, Costa Rican Independence Day Tuesday

The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie. ~Agnes de Mille


DANCING WITH TICOS
I smell like sweat. Not my sweat. Even showering last night when I got home does not seem to have removed the faint odor of sweaty man and cologne. But I was dancing --- really dancing. Not pretend dancing in Colorado Springs, taking salsa lessons. Dancing in a building that looks like an enormous barn with no walls. El Ranchito.

I was not dancing well, of course, but I was dancing with excellent partners. Even bad dancers here are better than most of the men we dance with. It’s something born in Latin American hips, I think.

Norberto, of Papagayo Tours, who we had dinner with Friday night, is here. We will dance, “ahorita.” I know already that “ahorita” here is as indefinite as it is in Mexico. We stand waiting for the live band to come back on. He does not want to dance to the DJ.

I am asked to dance by three different men. I turn them down. If I understand Gloriana and Cecilia correctly, you dance with people you know or are introduced to, but not strangers. I am already pushing my luck by dancing with Cecilia’s husband Marcos and Norberto, who are not friends and don’t like each other. Norberto has absolutely nothing kind to say about anyone in this family. I’m just an observer, but the idea that I have misjudged people --- well, let’s just say it’s sort of a habit of mine.

MACHISMO
Norberto says he wants to dance only with me. I am intrigued on a Spanish teacher level at the first-hand experience I am have the privilege of witnessing. Wow. Machismo. It’s not just something you read about. Remember that this is the man whose shoulders the waitress was rubbing only the night before?

Norberto dances and puts his hands on my hips and says, “Feel it in your hips.” Sigh. Even my dancing betrays my white girl-ness. I have all the steps. I can follow. But these women are doing something strange and alien with their hips that I feel silly watching and imitating. I feel like Baby in Dirty Dancing. But I am ever so grateful for the salsa lessons I took in Colorado.

There is no entrance here. No bouncer. No one is carded. This is a 19 year old traveler’s dream.

Marcos is a close talker, an interrupter, a shoulder tapper. Most of them allow me, by my standards, no personal space. When we dance, Norberto doesn’t even bother with the dance floor. He starts dancing there on the edges, banging me into people nearby and setting my feet down on the tops of others. I wonder who I know who I will bring here: not Heather. People are smoking, but it’s open air, so you can hardly tell. Mostly you notice that when you move through the crowd, the crowd does not disperse. It stands and looks at you until you squish past like a gymnast. I do not think Americans are rude. I think the clash of cultures makes them appear rude. I am “friends” with these people immediately. I am offered a daily delivery of fish by Marcos. Never buy fish again, he makes me promise. I do. But mostly because the fish I bought in Liberia was flavorless. But for an American, to incessantly have your shoulder tapped during a conversation is irritating. In fact all unwelcome and uninvited touching is unusual among strangers.

At 11:00 I am ready to go home to Kassidy and to check my internet access one last time before going to bed. My neighbor with whom I share an internet connection has disconnected my line because hers is not working. She then left for work, leaving my cable connected to her computer all day. She is nice and kind, but seems to lack an understanding of how crucial it is that I get my connection back before she goes to bed.

I have driven and am not drinking. I suggested we take two cars, but they said they didn’t have enough gas to go to Playa del Coco. Marcos, already drunk, says he will stop drinking and drive my rental car home. Excellent idea! He will not stop interrupting my objections and while I am fighting to tell him that he can’t drive my rental car and feeling like I am talking to an obnoxious high school student, I realize that I am talking to a Costa Rican man. A Costa Rican man. And I hope that I do not have verbal bullying to be part of every conversation with a man here.

After we dance Marcos says that I should call him and we should come dancing just the two of us. I don’t understand. He says it again. I say, “Sometimes I just don’t understand the Spanish.” He is left befuddled and unable to explain while I walk away. Is it possible that this 26 year-old husband of my friend is propositioning me? And I remember the Culture Shock book I read on Costa Rica that Johnny Mac made fun of me for reading that said that Latin American machismo requires that all men, regardless of marital status, hit on all women in order to be considered virile.

At the end of the evening, Marcos does not want to leave. Gloriana and Cecilia do not want to leave. I understand. The night is truly only just getting started. The band has only just come back from a break. Regardless, I’m going home. I go out to the car and a truck is parked behind my car. I try to back around him and he comes out to help guide me out of the itty bitty parking space around his gigantic truck. I am impatient now. Wouldn’t it be easier to move the truck? I see.. too late… that he is perhaps the drunkest man I have ever met, and he has just gotten behind the wheel of a car to, I hope, move his truck in reverse. He does not. He lurches forward, towards my little car, and I scream. Marcos is on him. I move the car out of the way. Marcos is chest to chest with this plowed man.

The parking lot is packed with double-parked cars and I decide to take a taxi here from now on.

Yes… it was fun. And now I am fed up and want to go home. I want my internet access back. I want to talk to a man back home who at least pretends to treat me like an equal. I want to wash some of this sweat and cologne off of me.


Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it. ~Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle


MASSIVE CULTURAL MISCOMMUNICATION
I have made a cultural mistake today. I was unwilling to leave Kassidy at home in “The Manor” (what she is calling the Big House now, after the house in the Charmed T.V. show) not because she wouldn’t have been safe, but because she would have been scared. So, I suggested that she come down to the collection of houses on the beach and hang out with the cousins while the Aunts and I went dancing. They suggested that the girls (the two female cousins who are about Kassidy’s age) and Floriana, the three year old, come up to the house to swim. This seems reasonable. Three teenage babysitters for one child, plus company for Kassidy. They say they will come at 7. They call at 8:20 and say they are coming “ahorita.” (Every German reading this is appalled, huh?)

At 9:00 they arrive. We don’t actually leave to go dancing until 9:30. Scott and Clara Rosa and Quiana and Kevin. Plus the two teenage girls. Plus two or possibly three teenage boys. Plus Floriana. Plus two adult women I have never met who are introduced as cousins. Plus the three who are going dancing, Cecilia, Gloriana and Marcos. Scott is here because he suspected that this might not have been my intention and wanted to keep an eye on things. Fabulous. One of the boys jumps into the pool fully clothed because he doesn’t have a bathing suit. I decide to clean later and just go along with it for now. What it is I did wrong, I cannot exactly put my finger on.

The good thing, though, is that Kassidy spent the evening talking with these girls. She was included in the conversations, feels that they like her, and is fairly certain that the boys have crushes on her. (For which I am only relieved. The attention of other 12 year olds is a vast improvement over the attention of the men in Liberia.) “Why do you think they have crushes on you? Did the girls tell you?” “No. I could just tell by how much they laughed. I’m just good at reading people. (She didn’t get that from me.) Besides, I was thinking about it and I was the only girl in the room they weren’t related to.”

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF NON-RAINY DAYS
Saturday morning Pedro came to keep painting the house. He asks why we haven’t gone to the beach in two days. I am beginning to understand their perspective after Friday’s rain. A sunny day in September is rare. Wasting it is unwise. In October it will rain every day and we will not see the sun for a week at a time. We go to the beach.

I have left the camera card in the computer, uploading pictures. You’ll have to trust me that Kassidy swam and laughed and was her usual beautiful, smiling self. “Swim with me, swim with me!” We did an interesting dance. We jumped waves while watching our belongings on the beach. I asked a woman sitting near us, “Is it safe to leave our things here while we swim.” “No mucho.” She said. I resolve to bring only towels and sunscreen and water to the beach from now on. Every time someone walked down the beach, we left the water (called “el mar”, by the way) and returned to our towels.

The beach is lovely. It is also very hot. I order a Foo Foo drink from El Velero and Kassidy gets a mango smoothie. We pay the equivalent of $6.00. Sitting on the beach, I think of all the times I have wanted to be right here, sitting on the beach with a Foo Foo drink, reading. I have a copy of Los Cuatro Acuerdos (The Four Agreements) that I begin teaching on Tuesday. In my beach fantasy there is a handsome and tanned man rubbing sun tan lotion on my back. In reality there is a child who is rubbing sand and sun tan lotion into my back and saying, “Mommy, come swim!” This is good, too. Very, very good.

CELL PHONE
The cell phone lent to us by the owners of the house has stopped working. It says only ‘Call failed.” Apparently the monopoly of cell phone service here put out a message on radio stations telling everyone to turn their phone off and then on again sometime during the day. I didn’t do it because I wasn’t listening to the radio. I have no idea what the reason was or what the implications are. When Verizon wants to communicate something, they send a free text directly to the phone. But… you know… a radio commercial… that works, too, right? I’m becoming used to, if not at all comfortable with the phrase, “Es Costa Rica” as an explanation for why some things don’t work.

COSTA RICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY
Kassidy should start school on Tuesday, we tell Janet, who we are meeting for the first time at the desk of El Velero. There’s no school Tuesday, she says. “EVERY TUESDAY?” I ask, probably louder than I should have. (Can you tell I’m ready for Kassidy to go back to school?) No, just next Tuesday. It’s Costa Rican Independence Day. I have forgotten this. Apparently so did the secretary at the school. We will go to Liberia Tuesday to see the parade.

If anyone would like to make this part of their lesson plan this week, I’ll post pictures. I’m going to have to pull out my books to recall the details of how Costa Rican independence came about, but I’ll try to read up.