pura vida

Guys, the first week here was pretty rough. We were tired, hot and hungry. I actually wrote a whole thing about my food issues the first week but I decided it was too boring to actually post. Basically, we got here and we had no food, I’m not familiar with the basic ingredients, and in general I have a lot of knee-jerk emotional reactions to food. This latter point led to some irrational, weird and myopic thinking that exacerbated my food-related problems. That’s pretty much it.

I keep reminding myself that learning is uncomfortable, which is a thing I tell my kids all the time. But after week 1 I have a little more empathy for growing pains. I forget sometimes that kids are learning every day and therefor every day is uncomfortable for them in that way. Which is not to say that I was able to hold that perspective in our first week, because I wasn’t. At the end of every day, I was pretty much extremely annoyed with all the growing and learning and fighting and complaining and feelings.

I was supposed to be having “a vacation,” which meant putting on my away message at work and trying to get some rest after our move. But it didn’t feel like a vacation, scrambling to put food on the table three times a day amidst the aforementioned food problems and trying to help everyone acclimate, both figuratively and literally. There is a very hot portion of the day here, from about 10-4, which just felt unbearable last week. It made sitting in an air conditioned room working look very good. I spent my vacation wishing I could be at work.

The coup d’etat of this non-vacation was a planned trip to Liberia, which is the biggest city around. I was going to pick up some things that we didn’t bring with us, like computer monitors, and also some things we didn’t know we would need, like extra fans. I was really not looking forward to this mini-trip, and I was super resentful that I was doing this for our family on my vacation. Typical bad-choices, then resentment-about-my-own-bad-choices stuff.

So the day of my mini-trip, I got all my things ready. I was taking Sinh for company and as a bodyguard for my facebook marketplace dealings, as well as to lighten the load on Trieu, who was minding Vien and An.

On this trip, many things happened. We got stuck behind a very small truck carrying an over-stuffed load of palm fronds on a road called “the monkey trail.” We listened to Kendrick, Freddie Hubbard, and Grace Jones vis a vis Shyne vis a vis Travis Scott. Sinh’s choices, of course. We completed all facebook marketplace purchases, even though I had to locate my fan retailer by describing myself as “llevando un gorro muy extrano.” (thanks to Lipingx2, Thao and Fan for the strange hat I wear it all the time!). We were sold by a fast-talking tico at the carneceria on many frozen tilapia filets. We went to Walmart twice. (!) As you can see by my increasing use of exclamation points, this trip turned out to be a gift. It was full of all the hardship, heat, and lack of food that had characterized the trip thus far, but I was able to appreciate the newness of it, and all the possibilities that lay ahead. Plus my fan retailer is now my facebook friend (he must have liked my gorro extrano).

This morning I went to a cove beach with two islands on either end of each point. I swam between each island as rain fell in the cove, and walked with Nene and Trieu around one of the islands, looking for bright tropical fish in the tidepools. It was hot, and I was hungry. For week 1, it was a pretty typical day.