My grandmother is a missionary in Costa Rica, and my family is lucky enough to visit her for about a month at a time every couple of years. Perks of being homeschooled.
When we go to Costa Rica, we don’t go to these places.
We went to these places.
While other visitors were swimming at the beaches and seeing only the touristy spots, my family did quite different activities.
One afternoon we gave half of our grandmother’s fourteen dogs baths. That’s seven dogs we bathed.
We visited the bustling markets.
We saw unusual wildlife.
The orange juice we drank was freshly squeezed from the oranges in the backyard. The bananas were picked from the trees outside my bedroom window. Any other fruit we ate we purchased from stands on the side of the road. My grandmother would do a little haggling in Spanish.
We picked coffee beans off of the bushes, ate them raw, and had coffee from the freshest beans.
We also zip-lined over the mountains, bathed in more than one volcanic hot spring, and built a dam in the stream in the woods.
We dined in restaurants without walls, played soccer with the Costa Rican kids, and fed wild monkeys.
We got to practice our Spanish, helped set up a camp of American dentists offering free care, and immersed ourselves into an entirely different culture.
The adventures we had in Costa Rica are countless. The difference between my family’s experience and any other tourists is that we saw what was real. We didn’t just get to see the polished, tourist traps. We saw the kids playing in the mud, the families living in half-finished homes, the people with brutal injuries and diseases unable to get the medical care they needed.
It’s a different pace in Costa Rica. Everything’s faster, more dangerous. We spotted an innocent looking toad outside a motel once, and before we could pick it up we were informed it was toxic. People are also more personal down there. Being kissed on both cheeks by complete strangers that were introduced to me became something I had to get used to. They were very curious about me and my siblings, four blonde white kids who didn’t seem thrown off by this new place.
If you ever go to Costa Rica, travel off the beaten path. Meet the people, eat in the wall-free restaurants, don’t pick up ordinary-looking toads. It’s a whole different culture in the same world as yours.