Suebob's Red Stapler

San Jose street

San Salvador welcomed me with a tiny, stinky airport bathroom with 2 out of 3 toilets not working. Bienvenidos a Centroamerica! As much as I like to complain about my US homeland, I must admit that we truly rock at plumbing.

From San Salvador to San Jose in Costa Rica is a one-hour flight. I arrived tired, literally red-eyed and feeling like I had been beaten with a stick. Waiting for luggage felt like it took four hours, but it always does, right?

It’s always the same – the waiting, the circling, the mistaken luggage sightings, the inevitable annoying French couple and their annoying, perfect little French offspring and their well-made cute luggage.

I let myself get reamed a little at the airport money changer with the crappy exchange rate, covering my bases in case I couldn’t find CC and had to take a taxi somewhere, even though I didn’t know where that would be since in Costa Rica they do not have street addresses. I am not making this up. No street addresses. For instance, my hosts’ address is “Go to the (name of the) shopping center, go 10 meters northeast, turn left, go 50 meters east, turn right, second house on the right.”

I asked Doña A. how they get mail and she said “We have a PO Box. I have no idea what other people do.” Doña A. is Salvadoran and thinks the no addresses thing is wacky.

I emerged from the airport into the moist Costa Rican air at the pickup area to find CC and Don E. smiling and waving. Oh, wait, no I didn’t! I emerged to find overly helpful taxi drivers and…no one.

Ha ha! My favorite scenario – barely awake in a foreign country with no one to pick me up and no idea where I am supposed to go. I freaked the hell out for about two minutes, then peeled myself off the ceiling, found a nice clean bathroom, splashed cold water on my face and went out to call Don E’s cell phone.

Once I figured out the phone and the 8-digit phone number, Don E. said they were about 15 minutes away because traffic was bad, so I passed the time speaking bad Spanish with a guy who hangs out at the airport waiting to help people with their bags.

CC and Don E. showed up in a Toyota 4-runner. The little airport guy helped me hustle my bags and got a tip for the effort. He sent me off with a “Pura vida!” the national saying of Costa Rica and the first of many, many times I was to hear it over the next 10 days.

It’s really a sweet thing, a national saying that can express so much – good wishes, happiness, excitement, good-bye…People say it ALL the time. I wonder what our national saying would be in the US.

Costa Rica driving and traffic reminded me of being in Mexico, with smoke-belching buses and manic, lane-hopping taxi drivers. The difference was that there are coffee plants RIGHT there by the side of the road. I gaped as if I had never seen a plant before. Coffee! Right there! Why it should be so stunning to me that coffee comes from somewhere, I don’t know, but I was impressed.

I was happy to be back in a Latino country. I love the lively streets with the stores open right to the sidewalks, the people hanging outside, the crazy mix of restaurants next to tire stores next to lumberyards – everything feels so filled with life.

CC unlocking the security gate at the home where we stayed.

Our hosts live in a lovely, bright modern home where they rent rooms to Spanish students like CC. They welcomed me in, fed me toast and fruit, and sent me off to bed for about 4 hours of complete collapse. Costa Rica would have to wait.

A red-eye flight seemed ridiculous to me. I know that there are people in the world who are able to board an airplane, drop into blissful slumber and arrive at their destination bright-eyed and ready to take on the world and everything in it.

I also knew that I would not be one of those people because I am a pretty, pretty princess who can feel a split pea buried under a 12-inch Tempur-pedic mattress and who cannot sleep because of it.

Yet somehow, in some crazy way, I performed the mental gymnastics necessary to convince myself that I could board a 12:25 a.m. flight out of Los Angeles and wake up in Costa Rica at 9:40 a.m.

I imagined the flight as a dark and peaceful respite from the rest of the world. We would board, find our seats and the staff would lower the lights as a hush descended over the airplane. The 2 inches we could recline our seats would allow our bodies to relax and slumber as comfortably as if we were at the Ritz-Carlton.

What the hell, people? Clearly, my brain has begun to rot.

First, I underestimated the cheerful energy of Latinos traveling home. The four Honduran ladies in front of me started chatting across the aisle before they buckled their seat belts and did not stop for seven hours.

The two Colombian girls beside me were even worse. In addition to being absolutely stunning and chic (and there isn’t anything more galling than someone who can look chic when stuffed into the middle seat of a Row 17 economy class airline seat at 2 a.m.), they alternately chatted happily and then fell suddenly and simultaneously into hour-long naps.

I was envious to the point of fury. Just as I would nod off for 30 seconds, they would awaken and begin to talk with great gusto. When I pried my red, sticky eyes open to regard them balefully, they would descend back into sleep, lithe bodies gracefully twisted like pretzels in the tiny space, their perfectly blown-out hair fanning out around them.

Then there was the staff. Most of the American airlines I have flown recently have been staffed by crews who are surly and reluctant to leave their jump seats. I haven’t gotten an airline meal since I was in college.

But the TACA/LACSA flight crew performed their duties with a busy, machine-like, almost cruel efficiency, considering the time of day. Every fifteen minutes or so, they would come by with food or drink or to clean up the trash or to ask incomprehensible questions in Spanish as I desperately tried to conjugate the right verbs in my head.

They even served breakfast of french toast and eggs at 4 a.m. Four o’clock in the freaking morning. The smell of eggs is a little touch-and-go for me at any time of the day, but the 4 a.m. breakfast almost sent me reaching for the Adios bag (you know, the one with the little twist tie on the top located conveniently in your seat back.)

I think the total of sleep interruption opportunities was two drink runs, two food runs, four trash runs, a pass to hand out headphones, another to give out duty-free catalogs and another to sell duty-free items. All in a four and a half hour flight. God bless those hard-working people. I hope they get a discount on Dr. Scholl’s gel insoles.

So I ended the first leg of my flight in San Salvador at 6 a.m., tired, gritty and with my hair stuck up on one side in a most fetching and unfixable fashion. Meanwhile, the Colombian girls smoothed their white skin-tight jeans and strolled around the airport in 5-inch heels, stretching a little and tossing back their impossibly thick and straight hair.

The miracle of flight is a wonderful thing, and I give thanks that I have the opportunity to see other parts of the world. But I do think God could be a little kinder and not make me sit next to Colombians.