Costa Rica rarely fails to deliver on pleasant experiences. You can’t beat the beaches. A pile of gallo pinto, arroz con pollo, or just about any form of casado will definitely hit the spot. A hike through a national park that leads to a picturesque waterfall will refuel your soul’s drained batteries. We’ll call these macro-pleasures. They’re the big stuff. If you hang out long enough in Ticolandia you start picking up on the smaller stuff. Let’s call these micro-pleasures. These are the little things that happen while living in Costa Rica that give you a little bump of joy.
Say Hey When You Enter
My cedula expired recently. The cedula is an ID card that tells the world that I’m a permanent resident of Costa Rica. Since I want to continue to live happily in Costa Rica, I had to set up an appointment to get it renewed. This ultimately led me to a faraway bank where I had to convince a guard that I had an appointment so he’d let me in so that I could hopefully show the bank lady all of the proper documents in order to successfully renew my cedula. As I sat amongst a few others waiting for my turn, secretly fretting that I didn’t have some important paper, new folks would enter the waiting area and each one would say hello to the group.
I love this about Tico culture. At the bank, at the doctor’s office, at the super, just about anywhere really, when you enter you give all of the people that are already there a nice ‘Buenas!’ or ‘Buenos dias!’ or something. It’s a nice little pinch of pleasantness that hands down beats ignoring everyone in public or just staring at a phone.
A Good Place for a Picnic
I’ve never actually asked a Tico about this, but I’ve witnessed it so many times that I know it counts as a funny little idiosyncrasy of Costa Rican culture. Any point on the side of just about any road is a perfectly suitable place for a picnic. Sometimes it’s a spot that anybody would pick, a family sitting at a table and chairs under a large shady tree or on a little hill with a view of a lake. Many times, there’s a full picnic set up in a completely random roadside spot where it seemed as though someone in the back seat screamed ‘Picnic!’ and the driver slammed on the breaks and pulled over. I come from a long line of dads that refuse to stop driving for any reason, so a roadside picnic is out of the question for my little family, but I do appreciate the randomness of this quirk of Tico culture.
Did she call me Papi?
I am a gringo. I’m from the US. My Spanish is passable these days, but I’m pretty sure nobody is confusing me for a native-born Costa Rican. A lot of the time while I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing in public, the folks at the store or restaurant or gas station or whatever treat me and talk to me like a gringo. That is, they’re a little nervous that I’ll have absolutely no idea what’s going on and they’ll use simple, impersonal Spanish that they hope I’ll be able to understand. I take absolutely no offense to this. They’re getting through their workday as easily as possible, and it’s my job to learn the language and figure out life for myself.
Between Ticos there is a lot of informal language used. Instead of stuffy sir or madam, people refer to one another as Pa, Papi, Ma, Mami, mae, or any one of a million other little names. My wife gets all sorts of good ones while going about her business, she’s ‘my love’, ‘my queen’, and ‘my beauty.’ There’s little chance of someone calling me their love, but every now and then I get a ‘Papi’ and something in my little gringo heart loves it. It feels like a little acceptance into the culture.
After more than a decade of living in Costa Rica, these are a just a few examples of what I love about Tico culture.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica.
