Gringos in Paradise
I fell in love with the pura vida lifestyle when I first visited Costa Rica during my senior year in college and swore to return. The next year, I buy a one-way ticket and rent an apartment on the beach with some friends from California and prepare for our inner surf goddesses to emerge.
The surf gods must have been distracted when the fin of my surfboard slices open my eyelid, obliterates my contact lens and gives me a black eye. Now I am blind, bruised, and bleeding from the face.
I drop my board in the water and start running for the shore.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!? my friend shouts after me.
TO THE MEDICO! I yell back.
Despite my pleading for a butterfly bandage, Dr. Alfredo tells me I need stitches on my eyelid, but first he injects my eyelid with a syringe of anesthesia. Cringing yet? Multiply that by 500. After he finishes sewing up my eyelid, he tells me that I look like Frankenstein.
Every day at 5pm we watch the sunset and play a game we’ve created, called the “Top 5 at 5”. We choose the top 5 best-looking guys in the town, and the only rule is that there are no repeat nationalities (meaning only 1 Argentinian, 1 Brazilian, etc), which is quite difficult in a town overflowing with surfers from all over the world.
We’re the social butterflies in the surfer party scene, we know that Surf Camp (an outdoor playground-turned-bar filled with wooden swings, ping pong tables, bongo drums) is best on Wednesdays and we’re wise enough to only ride the mechanical bull once.
We hitchhike to the other end of town on Fridays to go to Mar Azul, we befriend the bartenders at Tabu and flirt with penny-pinching surfers who buy us a round of “guaro limon” cocktails.
My friend has acquired a job at a local t-shirt shop owned by three American surfers who fell in love with the town and never left. She gets paid 1000 colones, which equates to 2 dollars an hour, and falls in love for free.
Feeling lucky to have narrowly escaped the wrath of the surf gods and with stern instructions from Dr. Alfredo to avoid the sun while my eye heals, I leave Costa Rica to explore the rest of Central America for the next 3 months.
