Maeology

One of my favorite things about my five-year-old daughter is that before she runs anywhere, she winds up like a cartoon character. She leans...

She listens happily as cafetales grow back through fresh cement, as condominiums crumble into dust,

In a binational relationship, the person who gets to live in his or her native country doesn't always have the upper hand.

Did you excel at our "Costa Rica: The Quiz"? Here's another round of questions to test your inner Tico.

Labor Day in the United States is as good an excuse as any to revisit the fascinating origins of "brete."

When you’re tuckered out from a long day using Costa Rican slang at every conceivable opportunity, how do you announce you’re ready for bed?...

When I worked in English-language education and visited an advanced young-adult class in San José, I asked them what their biggest challenge to language...

As a U.S. citizen living in Costa Rica, I’m thinking of this Valentine’s Day almost like another Thanksgiving. At a time in history when...

The Tico Times is on the lookout for Costa Rican love stories; share yours and be entered in a raffle for our latest book.

Costa Ricans, looking down the street to see their bus approaching, might say, “Allí viene la nave” – “there comes my boat.” The first time I heard my husband say this, years ago, I was charmed, and I have thought of the city’s buses that way ever since.

To have a child in another country is to take on an entire nation as your mother-in-law. It’s a new family, or culture, into...

I have lived in the same house for more than 10 years, but I have traveled quite a distance in that time. I have trouble channeling the college student who devoured the country with a ridiculous grin, unable to believe her good fortune, staring in rapture out of bus windows, listening wide-eyed to howler monkeys at night and thinking they were lions, making bioluminescent footprints on a deserted beach, getting lost, being found. Somewhere along the way I moved from “Will you LOOK at THIS?” to “Oh, yeah – that’s amazing, isn’t it?”

If I had to choose, I'd say that the most colorful turns of phrase in the languages I know and love can be found in...

It was still pitch black when I sat up in bed, thoroughly annoyed. “What is that damned noise?” I asked my husband, on whom...