Geodog

Impressions of Costa Rica after a month's visit: Tico Time

The pace of life in Costa Rica is considerably slower than it is in the United States. Part of this was undoubtedly because we traveled as tourists, mostly in rural Costa Rica, in the low season. I'm sure that it would have been somewhat different in San Jose in the high season, or working at Intel's plant in Heredia. Still, people in Costa Rica aren't as frantic about getting things done on time as people are in the US. Costa Ricans act as though people are more important than deadlines, and people expect to make time for each other, and to wait for other people and to have other people wait for them. Expatriates, and some Costa Ricans, call this living on Tico Time. Punctuality is not next to godliness, and waiting is not seen as offensive, or as a waste of time. We ran into this all the time. The best example of this was one day when a hotel owner offered to take us and some other people in the hotel up to see turtles coming ashore to lay eggs at Ostional (a fantastic trip). He said that we would leave the hotel after lunch, and I asked him exactly when after lunch we should be ready to go. He shrugged his shoulders, looked at me and slapped his empty wrist and said "you see a watch? We will leave when everybody is ready to go." It worked both ways -- once we were about to go out to dinner and another hotel owner stopped us and asked if we would help her middle-school aged son with his homework, because he had a test the next day but was still confused about the difference between the comparative and the superlative. Having made her house into a home for our family (mi casa es su casa), she expected that we would do no less for her family. So we happily postponed our dinner for an hour to tutor her son.

Living with tico time was not always easy. One morning we got up early, hoping to climb up to the top of Rincón de la Vieja volcano before it was covered with clouds, but when we got to the entrance to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, we found a scene from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. There was long line of other hikers waiting to pay the entrance fee at the guard hut. There was only one person taking the entrance fee, and he was filling out meaningless paperwork (name, nationality, passport number, hotel staying at ...) for each person and giving lengthy directions to each person, while other guards lounged around outside the hut. However, instead of standing in line feeling my blood pressure rise, I had someone save me a place and went off in search of a White-Faced Coati that some other hikers had seen earlier, and was rewarded by watching one eat some fruit for 15 minutes. I relearned the motto of Carl Franz, the writer of the The People's Guide to Mexico, the world's best guide book, "Wherever you go ... There you are!"

On the whole, while tico time drove me nuts in some respects, and it would require some significant retraining of my type A personality to live and work in Costa Rica, the fact that people made time for people, and that they rarely seemed rushed or in a hurry was extremely pleasant, and a welcome change from the frantic pace of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. When we returned to the United States, I felt the change immediately. I went into our local supermarket on my first day back, and immediately felt like a stone-age native transported into the 21st century. People were moving so fast! They were racing in the parking lot and risking pedestrian's lives in order to ensure that they got parking spaces close to the door, pushing past each other in supermarket in their eagerness to get the best vegetables, then racing their carts to beat each other to the fastest cashier's line. I left, with only minimal groceries purchased, suffering a terrible case of culture shock. I'm still trying to get back up to United States speed.