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Rincon de Vieja Nat’l Park – Part 1

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Rincon de Vieja National Park is not at the top of the tourist list in Costa Rica. But it’s still worth visiting for anyone in the country for more than a couple weeks. Only 45 mins northeast of Liberia airport, it’s easily accessible.

My friend Stan and I spent our first day in the national park hiking the shorter, two-hour path. It was mainly forest / jungle so lots of beautiful tree sights, a mini-volcano / hot spring thing, and a mini-waterfall. About an hour and a half into our hike, it started raining. Pouring. Pouring harder than either of us have experienced. We turned around and started backtracking out of the park.

I had an umbrella, Stan had a jacket, but neither was effective for the torrential rains. We hitched a ride back to our hotel with a Dutch couple (we had walked the 4 kilometers to the park) who we also had dinner with later that night.

The next day we walked to the waterfall near our hotel and swam / stood in the little pool area the waterfall created. Obviously, the nature around the waterfall was stunning — green and attractive and large, angled rocks. When our conversation started treading on "how to improve Twitter’s UI" we had to bring ourselves back to nature. 🙂

That night, in a heroic attempt, we tried to walk to a neighboring lodge in the national park area to have dinner. The closest hotel was 3.5 kilometers away — most people drive or pay the $5 roundtrip fare for a hotel van to take you. We were feeling adventurous, so we set out at night. We got lost, confused, scared (of some attack dogs at one house we passed, the sole house in the deserted park area), etc etc. Even though we had seen the sign for the other lodge during the day, by night, Stan’s little headlamp couldn’t illuminate stuff enough for us to find our way. So we turned around and began the long, 3.5 km walk back to the hotel. Exhausting.

At dinner, we bumped into yet another Dutch couple, who we chatted with. They wanted someone to talk to, and importantly, start complaining to! They ragged on the hospitality impulse in Costa Rica restaurants, which was pretty funny to listen to. ("The service here is non-existent, it’s a spectacle, it’s ridiculous.") It was true that waiting tables doesn’t seem to be a skill at the staff at this hotel or other restaurants. With the waiter standing in front of us, Stan even told me, "Maybe I’ll get the same thing as you, so they don’t screw up our orders." (The prior night they had brought all of us the wrong dish, forcing the Dutch guy to demand to re-see the menu and compare plates to orders.)

All in all, our first couple days in Rincon de Vieja were fun, filled with nature, rain, and one too-long night walk. Little did we know our real physical challenge would come the next day….

Best Paragraph I Read Today (on LA)

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From Salman Rushdie in his novel Shalimar the Clown (review forthcoming). In poetic fashion it captures some essence of LA, and near the end of the graf speaks to why I think it’s a city better to live in than visit.

He praised the city, commended it precisely for the qualities that were commonly held to be its greatest faults. That the city had no focal point, he professed hugely to admire. The idea of the center was in his view outdated, oligarchic, an arrogant anachronism. To believe in such a thing was to consign most of life to the periphery, to marginalize and in doing so to devalue. The de-centered promiscuous sprawl of this giant invertebrate blog, this jellyfish of concrete and light, made it the true democratic city of the future. As India [name of daughter] navigated the hollow freeways her father lauded the city’s bizarre anatomy, which was fed and nourished by many such congealed and flowing arteries but needed no heart to drive its mighty flux. That it was a desert in disguise caused him to celebrate the genius of human beings, their ability to populate the earth with their imagings, to bring water to the wilderness and bustle to the void; that the desert had its revenge on the complexions of its conquerors, drying them, ingraining lines and furrows, provided these triumphant mortals with the salutary lesson that no victory was absolute, that the struggle between earthlings and the earth could never be decided in favor of either combatant, but swung back and forth through all eternity. That it was a hidden city, a city of strangers, appealed to him most of all. In the Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, only royalty had the privilege of remaining occult. In this brilliant burg, however, secrecy was freely available to all comers. The modern obsession with intimacy, with the revelation of the self to the other, was not to Max’s taste. An open city was a naked whore, lying invitingly back and turning every trick; whereas this veiled and difficult place, this erotic capital of the obscure stratagem, knew precisely how to arouse and heighten our metropolitan desires.

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The Global Tongue of the World: Panglish

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I’ve been in Costa Rica the past two weeks, so language (Spanish and English) is on my mind. Wired has an interesting, short piece on how Chinese is affecting the English spoken around the world. Here’s Slate’s helpful one paragraph summary:

The "likely consequence" of growing numbers of Chinese learning English without "enough quality spoken practice" means that "more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese." Already, nonnative speakers far outnumber native speakers, and in the next decade, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of those who use the language. English is "on a path toward a global tongue—what’s coming to be known as Panglish." And, "[s]oon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own."

Japanese and Korean Editions of My Start-Up Life

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The Japanese and Korean editions of My Start-Up Life are available for sale. Here’s the link to the Korean edition. Here’s the link to the Japanese edition on Amazon.com Japan. Below are the covers of each. Apparently the Japanese edition has several manga drawings of me and of other scenes, which is pretty amusing.

Koreamslcover Japancover

Why Costa Rican Weather (During Rainy Season) Feels like a War Zone

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I’m sitting at a restaurant in Costa Rica looking out over a ledge into the dark sky. Every 30 seconds the sky lights up and flashes a couple times — lightening. Soon, there will be thunder. The thunder will be loud. Louder than anything in the States. The thunder will last for a few hours.

Then rain will come, and in the rain the monkeys and other animals will make weird sounds.

The sky lighting up is like bombs exploding in the neighboring city; the thunder is the sound of bombs; the animal noises sound like surface to air missiles.

(Note: Costa Rica is a very safe and peaceful country. 🙂 )