Group Blog: Travel Experiences

April 24, 2009

Comment when yours is up and I’ll add your link!

Sara: What happens in Puerto Rico stays in Puerto Rico.
Aimee: Mumbai changed her perspective on life.
Clare: Nightmare travels in Romania.
Heather: Discovered an interesting culture within a culture in the U.S. in a small town.
Renee: Her greatest hits in travel.
Shannon: A walk down memory lane back to when summer vacation was the only thing on a kid’s mind.
Lydia: A wild Brazilian goose hunt all for a tambourine.
Abby: Her very exotic travels in…Canada!
Lauren: You won’t believe me but her adventures involve a bidet shower and alpacas.
Emily: An actual travel story in Chile, finally!

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Since this group blog post is a pretty open theme — Travel Experiences — I’ve decided to post mine on the hostels we stayed at while traveling through Costa Rica for two weeks. I actually took this from the travel blog I started specifically for that trip.

Hostel Warm Water. We gave it that name, because after visiting about ten other hostels in Costa Rica, its the only one that has had warm water.
Hostel Towels. A giant fan is installed in each of the rooms so high that you can’t change the speed it’s set at, and the speed it’s set at is HIGH. It’s like having your very own personal tornado in the room. The hostel does not provide you with blankets or sheets to use against this force of nature, so shivering and freezing cold, S. and I slept covered up in only our towels…still slightly wet from our showers, how pathetic is that?
Hostel Broken Bed. Not as dirty as it sounds, we weren’t doing anything naughty when it broke. We arrived at Playa del Coco after a long day of traveling and headed to a hostel recommended by a friend. Some friend he turned out to be! S. was so excited to lay down that he collapsed on his bed the minute we got in the room. That very second the entire thing came crashing down to the floor, completely falling apart. No problem, S. is a construction man, he knew how to fix it. He put the bed back together and lo and behold, as S. went to take a shower I sat down to read a magazine, and the second my butt hit the mattress, I too hit the ground. Fatties! We changed rooms and get beds that weren’t broken. End of story.
Haunted Hostel. Returning to Iberia where we had already been once and had stayed in Hostel Towels, we decided not to suffer again thinking it would be wiser to go somewhere else. WRONG! Walking up to a quaint looking building, some very nice Costa Rican girls showed us to our room where we had a bed complete with a mosquito net. Exciting and tropical right? The place looked a little old in the daylight, but charming nonetheless. Later on that night we were to think otherwise. Nightfall hit, and suddenly the old run down statues in the patio looked like evil gargoyles, suddenly the hostel’s one other guest, who during the day we thought had just been eyeballing us a little too long out of curiosity, was suddenly transformed into creepy guy lurking and staring at us, the flickering candlelight in the wind was just too much. I could practically feel the ghosts breathing down my neck. The wind howled and the walls creaked. The bathroom was outside, a little ways away from our room and after showering I was almost too scared to leave the bathroom alone to walk back to the room. Fortunately S. was too scared to be in the room by himself so he was already on his to look for me. Surprisingly enough, when we woke up in the morning nothing looked so scary anymore and we both realized we’re nothing more than giant wimps!
Hostel de la Gran Perdida (the Great Loss). At our most upscale hostel we thought everything was perfect. A giant TV, air conditioning, cheap prices, comfortable beds, clean showers, a good atmosphere(so good people didn’t even leave to go out to bars, they just hung out at the picnic tables out front), we could not have asked for more. Things were going smoothly until one day S. asked casually, “Have you seen my bathing suit Kyle?” No, I had not, we looked for it all over our room, asked the cleaning ladies if it had been left in the bathroom, asked the front desk if it had been turned in to the lost and found, all to no avail. S.’s beloved red bathing suit had been stolen! NOOOOO! Tears formed in his eyes as the reality that his bathing suit was lost and gone forever began to set it. “It was more to me than just a bathing suit,” he said tragically, “I will never be able to replace it.” We left the Hostel of the Great Loss in mourning.

*Edited to add: To this day S. is still upset about the loss of his bathing suit. He refuses to buy another, and that’s his excuse as to why he never uses the pool at our building. Please note, this trip was 4 years ago.

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Best Gift Idea EVER

April 23, 2009

S., please don’t read beyond this. Thank you. :)

I MUST BUY HIM THIS TOY!!!!!!!!!!! (Says the girl who’s income has just been cut in half).

It is a camera that you put on your dog’s collar so you can have a little video of what life is like from his or her eyes. As blog readers may or may not have realized, S. and I are obsessed with Papito. And S.’s other favorite thing in the world is technology and gadget stuff. It’s ideal! I’m pretty sure Papito wants it too so she can show us what she does while we’re out. :)

Thanks to Julia Alison’s blog for the genius idea.

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Overcoming Homesickness While Living Abroad

Here’s another topic that is bound to come up at one point or another amongst the expat crowd — being homesick.

“I miss my friends.”

“I miss my family.”

“I miss ____ (fill in name of hometown or college city).”

It happens to most, if not all of us at some point or another. The longing to be with people who know us in a place that’s familiar becomes overwhelming.

I don’t get homesick often, but when I do it runs me over harder than a micro barreling down Alameda on a poor kiltro (stray dog) wandering in the middle of the road. Missing all those things can be a black hole that’s hard to crawl out of. You start to wonder what your life would be like if you lived somewhere else. You start to idealize the people you used to know and the places you used to go. You start to focus on only what was in the past, forgetting to appreciate what you have in the here and now.

I’ve learned too important things that help me deal with being homesick.

1. Nobody is ever homesick forever — or at least nobody I know. You might feel a strong urge to go back home for a while, but it will pass. Yes, the age old wisdom really is true, “This too shall pass.” Eventually you’ll start to appreciate your life as is again, instead of wishing you were somewhere else. And if you have been homesick for an inordinate amount of time, maybe that just means you really should go back. But, homesickness for me has always passed within a month, and once it took two, but never more. So I comfort myself in knowing that homesickness too, shall pass.

2. Life goes on without you — accept it. At first when you live abroad, your friends start getting married, relatives start having babies, somebody’s grandma dies. And you miss it all. That feeling can be devastating, I know. Sooner or later, though, you’ll plant your own roots wherever you are. You’ll live through your own births and deaths and weddings and divorces and happiness and sadness. Those won’t replace what’s going on with your childhood/college friends and family back home. But, again, it comes back to living your life in the here and now, as corny as that may sound.

3. The beauty in being an expat is that you’re always missing someone, something, somewhere. Yes, I said beauty, that’s not a typo. In a sense it’s a little heartbreaking that you’re always far away from people and places you love. But, I really do think, that very few people are as appreciative of the friends and family they do have as expats are. When you miss someone or somewhere so much only then do you know how strongly you really love him/her/it.

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