On the plane to Miami I was miraculously sat next to a well-to-do artist. He was 1/2 black and 1/2 Chinese. His name was Hochi and he spoke English and Spanish, but he was very soft spoken and when he tried teaching me Spanish I couldn´t hear him over the plane engine. Insted of saying "what?" over and over, we gave up and just talked about women. In English.

Hochi has traveled all over (though not to Costa Rica) and he claimed he would be scared doing what I´m doing, alone. When Hochi said that, I remembered when I first moved down to Florida. I had a friend named Peter, he had moved from New York at the same time I´d moved from Indiana. So neither of us knew enough to not spend our first summer in Florida playing in the water traps at the local golf course, diving for lost balls. The lucky energy that kept us from being attacked by an alligator could have powered a $35 million Florida lottery victory. Point being: we didn´t know to be scared and nothing happened. We just made a shitload of money. Being scared is what gets you in trouble. I really believe that.

Hochi warned me especially about my hair. "With that hair you will be saying get away, get away." He told me that Latin American women will try and use me to get to America. He said they will trick me into impregnating them. "They´ll do it in a second to get to America," he said. And my first two thoughts were, 'Hey, it'd take more than a second,' and 'There would be nothing more beautiful than a red-headed Latina baby girl'.

But recall, I don´t want that attention. It seems like only yesterday that I finally quit having an antagonistic relationship with my hair; the last thing I want is to be treated like a circus animal. So I bought a nice baseball cap at the airport in Miami, in case Hochi esta correcto.

With ignorance on my side, I walked the back streets of San Jose, alone with my hair under my cap and my luggage and my fishing pole (which I was prepared to whack muggers with) in my hands as the sun set behind a sky of mountains. Costa Rica looks like Miami swallowed San Francisco and all the residents gave up English and chasing the superficial crap that Americans love.

I walked up steep, steep hills past long signs that could have been saying, "There are many muggers up this hill," but I didn´t understand them and just trudged up dumb and lucky until I found an amazing bar on top of a green hill. It looked like like the glass gates of heaven way up there. There was a fire burning on the side of the hill. The bar was upscale and wouldn´t have seemed out of place in Hyde Park, save the killer incline and the mountains hovering over it and the two beers for $3 deal. The place was empty and I sat in there forever writing and drinking and watching two babies dance under the crazy light show showering them from the ceiling as their parents clapped rythm across the room. When the babies speak they´re simplistic Spanish to each other, I understand every word."

I speak Spanish pretty damn well. I express my needs perfectly, but then I can´t understand what anyone else is saying. This has been a problem because I spit my flow at bartenders or whoever and they assume I know Spanish and just start going and I can´t understand they´re answers to my questions.

Last night I stayed at a youth hostel for the first time. There were four bunks but only one other guy in the room; a jocular Swiss/Latin fellow named Edwardo. He spoke broken English but great Spanish and I saw him only briefly at the beginning of the evening. He invited me out but then ditched me. He came home in the a.m. when I was sleeping and in the dark he said, to let me know it was just him returning: "I am Edwardo"

Around 4 a.m. I awoke with him shaking me. It was disoriented as he said, "I am Edwardo. Please stop that noise". I had been humming in my sleep. I wish I could go to a doctor for that. I tried everything to stop the hum for him, sans stuffing a pillow in my mouth. Eventually I went and slept out in the hostel lobby on the couch so as not to wake him. But I was unable to sleep so I went outside and crept around, staring at the moutains and the fog that was all a million miles away but still somehow right on top of me.

When Edwardo finally woke, he invited me to have lunch with him, check out the urban parts of san Jose and in the process, teach each other English and Spanish. The lunch was terrible and eventually I lost Edwardo in the crowd. I was told there are a lot of American´s here, but damned if I´ve seen 'em. Alone, with nothing but the dense crowd of brown faces, I noticed that people were indeed staring at me, especially the women, though I didn´t discern anything sexual in their glares. More like morbid curiosity or, "Poor thing."

Costa Rica is a pretty mellow place. I hope these entries become more entertaining. Shit, I haven´t even got to use the option on the Costa Rican keyboard that allows me to do this: ¿?

---m. p. w.

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