Maeology

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...

In English, I'm a crotchety old-school grump. I am an editor and a former English teacher, and happily embody the worst qualities of both, brandishing a red pen and waging a warring battle against change. In Spanish, I have no such loyalties. I have the tone deafness of the second-language learner.

There are taxistas and there are taxistas. But on the whole, I love the river of amiable, chatty, and well-informed men who have carried me around the city day after day and week after week.

Most weeks, I aspire to examine Costa Rican language and culture with as much subtlety and sensitivity as I can muster. Most weeks, I...

A Costa Rican Nativity scene: one Wise Man falls through La Platina, another into a pothole. The last one calls Joseph. Mae, I’ll be there later, ya casi llego. Traffic, mae. Es que vieras que en La Uruca hay UUUUna presa…

It turned out that every single home in the neighborhood had a special nickname floating above its roof, visible only to insiders. No wonder I had never understood directions around here. “You can’t miss it! Just go down by the Crazies’ house, turn left and keep going until you hit the Sausages.”

People who visit Costa Rica love many different things about it – its commitment to peace, its empty beaches, the epic kindness of its...