The Dog Who Looks Both Ways

There are no street names in Costa Rica. There are no house numbers. There are no mailboxes.

Ok…so how do you get around? How do you receive mail?

Directions are geared toward the locals. A block is referred to as “100 metros”. I live 75 meters north of the Musmanni Bakery, in front of the Catholic Church. The school I work at is 400 meters south of the Panasonic Factory. These are the simple addresses.

In the city of Alajuela, a movie theater is used as a landmark. The only problem is that the movie theater has been torn down and a bank currently stands in its spot. The “Cine Alajuela” no longer exists, yet it’s used in addresses all the same. In the San Pedro section of San Jose, there was a big tree, called “higueron”, which people used for directions, and although it too has long since been gone (for a good twenty years), all Ticos know it as a landmark, even the people who deliver mail.

There are no “mailmen” per say. To receive bills, for example, a representative from the company slips them through your door (or through the bars that surround it, which are there to keep out intruders). Unless you use FedEx, which can be up to $150 a package, sending mail outside the country can take weeks, even months to be sent, if it’s delivered at all.

The driving here is more aggressive than in the States (even in New York). One of the major differences is that in Costa Rica, pedestrians do not have the right of way. Cars zoom down streets and motorcycles weave in and out of traffic as people search for an opening to cross the intersection. Not only are people accustomed to this way of life, even the stray dogs that roam the streets know to look both ways when they cross.

Foreigners often seem perplexed by the directions, mail, and traffic patterns in this country. It’s the same way in Nicaragua as well, though not in Panama, a country created by the United States for transportation of goods. When I first came to this region, I found these differences particularly striking when compared to the US. Yet the more I thought about them, the more I made sense of it all. With directions like “seventy five meters south of the bakery”, sure people need to know where the bakery is, but they also need to know where south is. It’s harder to forget the four points of the compass when that’s what’s used to get around. This can only help develop an innate sense of direction.

One thing every expat learns is that there are many ways of looking at the world. Living abroad forces you to see things from a different perspective. This cultivates open-mindedness but it also creates challenges. It’s easy to see things as black and white, good and evil; it is harder to accept a world filled with murky complexities. Being pushed out of your comfort zone is certainly part of the experience of living abroad. but maybe this is something we all have to face. We are always changing, learning, adapting to our surroundings. Even the dogs learn to look both ways.