When you travel to a completely new part of the world, it’s like staring into a mirror: you can see everything behind you, but ultimately the object taking up most of the frame is you yourself.
I recently went to Costa Rica and got thinking on this framing and reflection of cultures. And mirrors.
Say you travel to a place you’ve never been before, Beijing, in a part of the world you’ve never been before, Asia. That mirror will have loads of reflections in the background—Great Wall, pandas, dumplings, high speed trains, queuing issues, smog, high rises, congestion, chop sticks, KFC, honking, sour foods.
There will be a lot there that’s new, but as you’re standing looking at that mirror, you will see a huge chunk of it is simply you. This is normal. The way that mirror is placed, you must be staring at 100% of yourself vis-à-vis surroundings.
Less metaphorically, this is normal, as well. You have no touch stone on which to bounce ideas off. If you’re from the US and have never been to Asia, it’s a completely new world. There’s so much that you can only understand from your perspective, so your voice will get muddied when you conceptualize said place, in this case Beijing.
If you’ve never used anything but a fork in your left hand and a knife in your right to eat food, then using other means might be odd. Chopsticks in China, fork and spoon in Thailand, hands only in India, spoon only for rice in Korea. These might seem odd at first, because they were for me and maybe for you. But you begin to internalize these many differences.
If you’ve never been in East Asia, you might be uncomfortable with crowds. Further you might be put off by how they treat public space. Much of daily life occurs in a public place: dancing, singing, eating, yelling, video gaming, board gaming, sleeping, sitting, exercising, drinking, anything. And it’s all packed. In the US, we tend to be a private people. Much of our activities take place at home or where others cannot see us. In a place like China where one literally can’t own land, events take place in public space.
This seems weird at first for an American, until you realize that in much of Western Europe, the plaza, praça or piazza serves the same purpose. Especially in these cultures, the public square is a meeting place, a gathering zone. These public areas are spaces in which to conduct activity.
An American reflecting on solely China’s take on public space will view it as weird. But here’s the rub—if you happen to have European mirrors, too, then us Yanks are the odd balls. As you travel to various places, you gain more mirrors.
Three-Mirror Perspective
This holds both from a physics sense and the metaphorical one I’m bludgeoning you with.
If you have three objects, two mirrors and one yourself, set up in a triangle, then the reflections appear differently. No longer is it a straight reflection of your gleaming self. Light bends, angles change. Unless you’re an iguana, you can’t look at both simultaneously, so you must process them alternatingly.
You must triangulate the three perspectives to understand any and all of them.
Fortunately for you, Costa Rica has plenty of iguanas.
If you have a third place/idea from which to bounce a foreign country’s customs off of, your perspective changes. The idea of a so-called “People’s Square” in China, a plaza in Western Europe or a local park with a baseball diamond in the US all start to make a little more sense. China isn’t filled with overcrowded public spaces just for fun. There’s logic.
How’s This Relate to Costa Rica?
After I traveled a bit in Asia, I wanted to rethink how I viewed the world a bit. In truth, as much as I loved Hispanic culture during my time in college, due to many Mexican and Spanish friends and influence from local neighborhoods in Chicago (where I was), I never really traveled to that world, outside of Spain. I’d never been to Latin America.
So the first change, was to start reading some literature. Octavio Paz and Yoani Sanchez influenced my thinking on the area profoundly, and I knew I needed some travel.
Not long thereafter I went with a Chilango buddy to Mexico City, that was a historical, culinary and visual arts focused trip. I went to the Anthropology Museum, ate every taco, drank every mezcal and stared at every painting possible. It was truly perspective-altering.
Then I visited Nicaragua with a gringo college friend, which was mostly hiking, swimming and walking through small cities and towns. (Okay. And drinking…dos Toñas, por favor!) This, too, changed how I view Latin American, having visited one of the most beautiful and welcoming places, yet mostly impoverished nation. (Only behind Haiti on this half of the world.)
Were I to visit Costa Rica before the bustling Latin American metropolis of Mexico City or scaling up the formidable cloud forest on Maderas Volcano, my view of the country would be irrevocably different.
Costa Rica is gorgeous. A towering mountain range runs the length of the country, serving as 12,000-foot tall spine. Human ingenuity knows no limits as bridges and overpasses scale cavernous gorgeous with ease, cutting journeys from days to minutes. The food, the people, the music. All beautiful.
(There’s gotta be a “but” here right?)
But, the influence of American culture is profound. KFC, Starbucks, McDonalds, BK, Hardee’s, Taco Bell, Office Depot, American Eagle, Hooters, Outback Steak House, Church’s Chicken, Payless Shoe Source. Honestly the last one was the most surprising. No Costa Rican business elite can muster up the capital to undercut PAYLESS SHOE SOURCE?? Surely that’s not right.
Look, I’ve been to enough places to know American enterprise runs deep and truly transnational. But this was exceptional. The small canton of Escazú inside San José housed all of these places and more.
Parts of Costa Rica are entirely built up with these stores, as was true six years ago, evidenced by a five-second Google search. This makes sense. It’s the richest nation in Central America. I think the argument that a country needs to “retain character” for others to enjoy as opposed to offering genuine amenities to the people is silly.
I’ve seen umpteen arguments about Chinese villages going the way of the dodo being “bad for the character of the nation.” I don’t think rural Chinese denizens need to use latrines and live in paper-thin housing subject to floods and conflagrations on a daily basis so some backpacker can waltz through and Instagram it. Development is necessary.
I just think they should draw the line somewhere. I think Hooters is that line.
Costa Rica is Fantastic
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Costa Rica. In future pieces, I will detail exactly why, from the rafting to the ziplining to the rain forests to the food to the people.
However, even though they border one another, my experience with Nicaragua and Costa Rica were infinitely varied, which is to be expected. (You know, being different nations, with different histories and different people and all that…)
This isn’t a lamentation, but a reflection. Having my Nicaraguan and Mexican pocket mirrors, I can see how those two nations inform my conception of a third Latin American nation. It doesn’t detract from it, but rather takes more of the protagonist (me) out of it. The many mirrors allow me to see the interplay in the cultures and subcultures.
I got to see American influence, Mexican influence, local customs, the effect of tourism and the results of quality leadership.
Conclusion
I aim to get as many mirrors from as many places as possible so that I can view a place froms completely different angles, so that I can view Costa Rica via its relative, isthmus neighborhood rather than solely from the view of a young, wanderlusting New Englander.
It helps inform me or you on a personal level and makes for me interesting thought pieces, I hope.
And most importantly it lets me smack you over the head one least time with a forced analogy.
When all these mirrors come together, all these tiny reflective bits representing various subdivisions of various cultures, it creates something wonderful, a cultural kaleidoscope.
Let me know what you think in the comments below! Agree? Disagree? Think I’m a silly gringo?
Like what you’re reading on China? Check out some other related articles in: The Costa Rica Chronicles!!