Couch Surfing (Grecia, Costa Rica)

I only discovered what www.couchsurfing.org was all about a month ago. Essentially, it´s a website that has a tonne of profiles from people all over this great globe of ours, that are either traveling or hosting. It is a reciprocal process where a host will offer a free bed in their house for travelers, and the travelers will eventually return the favor in their own abode.

After 10 days, I have ended my first couchsurfing experience.  I was blessed to stay in Grecia, Costa Rica, about a one hour bus ride outside of the captial city of San Jose where I stayed with my gracious host, Cesar and his mother Celi. I am something like Cesar´s 35th couchsurfer to date. Needless to say, Cesar has done his fair share of backpacking and traveling himself, so that is definitley one thing we have in common. Another is that Cesar is also gay, I actually found his profile in the couchsurfing subgroup for queers, or perhaps I should say in the rainbow colored section of the website. So not only am I learning about the local Costa Rican or ´Tico´culture, but I am also learning about the gay culture here as well.  Gee, it took me years to figure it out in my home town.  

Cesar and I have done a lot of cool things together. Nothing crazy out of the ordinary stuff, that many people would be expecting me to be doing on my so-called adventure,  but more of the day to day kinds of things that people would do. So, I have been hanging out with Cesar´s friends, shopping, going for coffee at various cafes, drinking at the local pub, singing karaoke, chatting with his mom in my broken spanish, etc.  One day just Cesar and myself took a small daytrip to San Jose and went clubbing at a place that is much larger than any gay club in my hometown of Calgary. It was on a Sunday at 5pm (early start due to Monday being the start of a new work week), but we arrived before the doors opened and had to stand in a line up around the corner. This is only one gay bar of like 10 or more in the city. Calgary has like 4. The bar played a wide array of music: cumbia, reggaeton, US top 40, dance/electronic, and salsa.  It was cool to see so many gay couples dance to salsa. Cesar was asked to dance and didn´t enjoy the experience because he´s used to be the one who leads, haha.  

This past weekend we went on a 3 day party filled trip out to a beach 2 hours away, called Jaco, with his new boyfriend and a few of his other buddies.  I gotta tell ya, it was tonnes of fun, but hanging out with a 5 other Ticos that all speak spanish, exchange jokes in their slang, tell in-depth stories, etc. was pretty hard for beginner spanish speaker Dean.  Not to mention that I was the oldest one in the group, trying to keep up with 20 somethings is challenging. Gladly, a couple of them speak English and would explain stuff to me everynow and again. It was best when we´d play games in the pool or in the hotel room, just actions, no words.... kind of.

It is so interesting to hang out with locals that know what they´re doing. I don´t have to be confused and lost the whole time, I can just go with the flow. Nor do I need to be scared of being robbed or whatnot (not that I always am). But for example, we hardly ever locked our hotel door and they all left their cell phones and cameras in their many times.

As well, it´s is nice to know that so many things (culture wise), once translated into English, is really just the same or very similar to what life is like for me in Canada. For example, Cesar and I spent a lot of time talking about relationships with friends and partners, we would gossip about this person or that, and talk about experience a, b, and c, and it was just like hanging out with my best friends in Calgary.

When traveling, I find it always so comforting to find a friend that I can chat with about our lives, and know about who each other is talking about. It takes a while to get the new friendship going, but Cesar was very inviting and I got to know his other friends and all about Cesar´s life, and vice versa.  I told him this morning at his house before I left, that my favorite times were when it was just the two of us sitting at the counter in his kitchen, eating our typical, delicious Costa Rican meals that his mother always so deligently cooked for us, chatting about life. Cesar is a beautiful human being, with a big soul, open minded and curious about culture, life, humanity, and love, just like myself.  Thus his reason for hosting couchsurfers.

Today he told me the significance of the tattoo he has on his back of a tree and a falling leaf, and how it reminds him of his travels in Europe where he first experienced the changing of seasons, and how magnificent it was to witness leaves fall and then come to life again in the spring. Just like life, he said, it is full of new beginnings, and when one leaf leaves this world, it leaves with happiness because it knows it will come back again.

Another thing he told me last week was about his Chinese friend he met while he was once backpacking. They were eating and she was given a fork to eat with and then went into her bag and pulled out her own chopsticks. When asked why she didn´t just eat with the fork, she said, I don´t know how to use a fork, I have eaten with chopsticks my entire life.  What a profound thought.  Life is filled with always more than one side, more than one perspective, more than one worldview.  It reminds me of the song I have come to embrace these last 4 months by Joni Mitchell, ´Both Sides Now´, in which she so eloquently expresses that life is full of two sides, and we never really know what life and love is about. Life can change so quickly, but there is always another side to it.

So here I am, on my own again. I wasn´t asked to leave nor did I really want to go, but I didn´t want to impose and overstay my welcome at the house. I am now in San Jose, going to explore the big city, and maybe meet some other backpackers once again, in my new fancy hostel.  With that said, Cesar is only an hour away and he is celebrating his birthday here in San Jose on Thursday, so we will party it up once more!