Costa Rica

The last time I boarded a plane to Costa Rica I was 22 – 22! – and my carry-on consisted of a 5 pound bag of gummi bears and my best friend, Jenny. This time I’m 28 – 28. – and I’ve got a copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and my husband, Peter. Other differences include a job, a house, eye cream packed in my checked baggage and the confidence of knowing what to expect.

My last trip to Costa Rica wasn’t spent vacationing so much as fleeing. Fleeing an explosive end to a relationship that came thisclose to ending in an engagement ring around my finger. Fleeing an upcoming 3 years of law school and a lifetime of over-time to pay back student loans. Fleeing every idea and expectation that I had for my life and trading that in for uncertainty, loneliness and, just maybe, hope.

Costa Rica was generous to me. Besides its jaw-dropping beaches, rumbling volcanoes and vibrant jungles, Costa Rica gave me something I had never before had, let alone felt – independence. Three months of beachcombing and thinking, hiking and exploring, swimming and depending only on myself for what to do that day and what I would do with my years to come.

I tried new things. Some of them – like eating rambutan (mamones in Costa Rica) and swimming in waterfalls, stuck. Others – like snorkeling (it took until a trip to Thailand 3 years later to break my fear of fish) and eating beans (I love them in the national dish of Costa Rica – casado – but still hate them in America) – did not.

When I came back home to Colorado on Christmas Eve I was sad. Sad to leave my paradisiacal lifestyle of hanging out on some of the world’s most beautiful beaches day after day. Sad to come back to my reality of needing to find a job (or else live with my mother forever – not happening). Sad to encounter memories of the almost-fiancee and how it all ended. But looking back, I shouldn’t have felt so sad. That trip – which I’m even more thankful for now that I’ve returned to Costa Rica – marked the beginning of my adult life. And if only I would have known then that it would all work out – and then some.

Fast forward 6 years. There are 2 more big differences between this 2-week jaunt and that 2 and a half month spell in Costa Rica: money and mode of transportation. Being a broke college student and having to pay back my law school loans (hey, I went for a month and a half, that should be worth something), I kept myself to a strict $10 a day budget.

That $10 included hotel (and I use that word loosely), food and transportation. Back then, before the real surge of tourism into Costa Rica, that kind of budget was possible if you were willing to sacrifice things like hot water, cleanliness and privacy. This time I don’t have any student loans haunting me and I’m even getting paid for each day I spend lying on the beach. Even though I’m not staying at 4-star resorts, I am a bit looser with my spending, especially when it comes to food.

The second key difference between the trips is our rental 4x4 Jimmy (or Jimny, as it’s printed on the car). While I was confined to bus and ferry schedules the first time around, now I have the freedom to go where I want, when I want.

You can learn a lot about a country and its culture from the passenger seat of a car (it’s a stick shift, and I don’t drive anything that doesn’t allow me to eat an ice cream cone and steer at the same time). Let’s take the U.S. for example. No matter where you drive – cities, plains, beaches or mountain towns – you’ll probably see lots of other cars and lots of Golden Arches. You’ll pass factories, stores, houses and gorgeous scenery.

Compare that to driving in Costa Rica. You’ll also see the occasional factory, store, house and loads of gorgeous scenery, but you won’t see a whole lot of cars or fast food. This is Day 5 of my trip, and I’m yet to see a single McDonald’s! Is it even possible to drive down America’s highway system for hundreds of miles or for 5 days without seeing a McDonald’s? What about just 5 hours? (Turns out, the longest stretch in the lower 48 states without a McDonald’s is about a 2 hour drive between Meadow and Glad Valley, South Dakota).

But Ticos (Costa Ricans) have gotta eat. So in addition to the immaculately-maintained soccer fields, the frequent bus stops (paradas) and the oh-so-green jungle threatening to over-run the roads, you’ll also see sodas.

Sodas aren’t beverages here; they’re restaurants, or diners. They are often named after the women who cook in them, like Soda Miss Sam or Soda Carolina. As we were driving out of Corcovado National Park and it was getting dark, I said to my husband, “Isn’t it comforting seeing a soda all lit up on the side of the road?” The truth is, you can’t drive very far without encountering a soda – or several. Kind of like Arby’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and Subway in the U.S. Except sodas serve a different type of fast food, and, as far as I know, all of them are locally owned.

Most sodas advertise ‘comida typico,’ which I’m guessing translates into ‘typical food.’ In Costa Rica, typical food always involves rice and beans, usually includes fresh veggies and/or fruits and some sort of protein, like fish, chicken, beef or pork. For $2-5, you can get casado at all but the most touristy towns (where it will be more like $6-7). Here’s what I got with my $3 casado yesterday: a huge portion of rice and beans, a salad, 2 grilled chicken breasts, a mound of mashed potatoes and the most delicious sugar-fried plantain you’ll find anywhere. At a Burger King, $3 won’t even get you a value meal of a Whopper, fries and a Coke.

To Costa Ricans, this – not KFC – is their highway stop-off. Yes, you’ll have to get out of your car, but the food is healthy, fresh and most importantly – really freaking tasty. Even to a girl who hates beans. Your casado – or arroz con pollo or rice and beans with coconut milk if you’re on the Caribbean side – won’t be ready in the time it takes to drive from the clown’s mouth to the pick-up window, but that’s because Miss Sam is in the kitchen cooking it; not a heat lamp.

Driving past and stopping at these sodas, I wondered what Costa Ricans must think about Americans when they visit our country and see all of the fast food. I imagine that most of them have experience with many of our chains – I saw a Schlotzky’s, Papa John’s and Cinnabon at the San Jose airport, a turn-off for a KFC and I know there to be a Pizza Hut in Jaco based on personal experience – but the difference is the hyper frequency.

Where there is 1 fast food chain per beach town in Costa Rica, there is 1 per corner in the U.S. They must think that we really like this food. That mystery meat and fried potatoes are the cornerstones of our diets like rice and beans are theirs. They must think that the coffee sold, literally, everywhere has burnt off our taste buds (and maybe it has).

So yes, this trip is different. I’m not fleeing any tumultuous life situations, I’m traveling with my husband, I’m getting paid. I have more money to spend so I don’t have to stay at places where a rat is furiously scratching his way through the ceiling directly over my bed. I don’t have to order the cheapest thing on the menu, casado. But I still do because it tastes so good. I guess not everything has changed.

Pura Vida!

I'm about to head to Costa Rica for 2 weeks, but here are a few chain-related thoughts for you to ponder while I'm gone:
1. Pray for me not to starve. Airports aren't exactly the easiest things to navigate when you're dodging chains. I'm baking cookies right now to bring along, just in case.
2. McDonald's and KFC have infiltrated central America (and the world), but are there Costa Rican chains? And how will I know if I'm eating at one?
3. Bones, the Denver Frank Bonanno restaurant, has one of the top 10 greatest things I've ever eaten on their menu: steamed pork belly buns. I was reminded just how delicious they are on a lunch date with my food mister (FM). Oh and Frank, please don't open another restaurant - right now your 4 sneak in under my chain quota.
4. The last time I was in Costa Rica I fell in love with Trits, a cookie/ice cream concoction. I'm bringing an insulated lunch bag with me so I can bring back the Trits, fully expecting them to melt. If I re-freeze them when I get home, will I get sick when I eat them? Do I care?
5. My cookies are done so I'm gonna go eat 4.

Banh Mi + Me = True Love

Bad news for Subway’s $5 footlong – I’m about to reveal the secret that will take you down. Two words – Vietnamese sandwich. Take that, Jared.

What’s that? You’ve never had a Vietnamese sandwich? You think it’s some sort of euphemism for sex with 2 Vietnamese child prostitutes? Well I was right there with you until this weekend.

First off – how did I find this place? It’s not like Viet sandwich cafes litter the streets, and Vietnamese restaurants typically limit their menus to pho and combination plates. I was in Denver for Pugs Day at the Park – aka Smeagol and Stella’s (my black and fawn pugs) favorite day of the year.

For Pugfest, hundreds of Denver-area pugs and their owners (or guardians, depending on how big of a hippy you are) take over City Park for an afternoon of games, socializing and stepping in pug poop. My pugs especially enjoy the eating contest. Smeagol won his first year at Pugfest, but fell to second place last year and slipped to third this time out (finishing just a second behind his much smaller sister, Stella).

After the pugs ate their hot dogs, I got hungry. Parking downtown didn’t seem very appetizing, especially with Octoberfest and the Great American Beer Festival going on this weekend. I first drove down Colfax, which is Denver’s sex-shop and drug-deal central. Or I should say was. While you can still catch a peep show 24 hours a day, the re-development of Colfax also means that you can score a really tasty meal at any of several excellent restaurants that have recently moved in. However, on this particular day, nothing was beckoning to me. Nope, I heard the siren call of Federal and, like Ulysses, was powerless to resist.

Federal Boulevard might be even more run down than Colfax. It houses significant minority populations, which means one thing in my book – phenomenal, authentic ethnic food. This is the taco cart, menudo, noodle and pho capital of Colorado. There may be bars on the windows and a distinct lack of English, but you can bet your bottom peso (or dong or yuan) that there’s good food to be eaten inside.

I drove down the street – which feels about 1,000 miles away from my suburban neighborhood but is in actuality only 20 – struggling to decipher the restaurants from the payday loans and liquor stores (I don’t read any Asian languages and it’s been a while since high school Spanish). The taco carts looked most appealing, but I didn’t have any cash after paying the pugs’ entry fee into the hot dog eating contest, and I assumed that an eatery on wheels wouldn’t take Visa.

And then I saw it. Not just Vietnamese – I’ve got lots of conventional Vietnamese restaurants in my ‘hood – but Vietnamese sandwiches. Something different. Something tempting. Something I had to try.

Inside they helpfully had photographs of all my sandwich (or banh mi) choices. Being a bit trepidatious of meats I’m unaccustomed to, I ordered 1 chicken and 1 BBQ pork. Each was just $2.75 and more than adequate to satisfy someone with a normal appetite.

Chicken, BBQ pork? This isn’t sounding so exotic. What is it that makes a Vietnamese sandwich Vietnamese, you ask. First, I’ve got to give credit to France. Yes before their days of “I surrender,” France controlled Vietnam. The French supply the crispy baguette and the Vietnamese added in local ingredients like cilantro, spicy peppers, pickled carrots and a variety of meats.

Some varieties spread on goose pate (trust me it’s good – even if you don’t like pate) and/or spiced mayonnaise. You can even get head cheese in it (Note: head cheese has nothing to do with cheese and a whole lot to do with head). All in all it’s a big punch of flavor wrapped up inside something so simple as a sandwich.

After I finished them I wondered what it was that made these sandwiches so much better than the deli ones I’m used to. Most of the components are the same as what I’m used to, and the ones that are different aren’t exactly different in a good way (ahem, goose pate). But somehow it all comes together to create something bigger, and tastier, than its parts. I’m not saying this will change your life, like Marco’s coal-fired pizza or dim sum will, but it will change your lunch hour.