Maeology

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...

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.