Sin Rastro...

Having mused on the purpose of my blog - which I decided internally was just because I cannot stop talking - I think it's probably a culture clash narrative. What I love about being away from home is the chance to compare cultures, perspectives, beliefs, customs, rituals... all these things and more. To do it between the US and the UK is always interesting, given that we share the foundations of a language, despite the divergence subsequently. Living in a country where the language really truly is different makes it much harder to pick up nuances. It's easier to feel stranded or isolated because you're not sure of the formality of the situation or suchlike - all these things become magnified, exponentially, due to this uncertainty and lack of surety.

The aim is generally not to rate which is better, which is worse, but to be that horror of all horrors - the RELATIVIST, as I was last night when trying to explain that indigenous people not wearing clothes didn't make their lives "ugly". My point being that it's not for me to judge, unless it is something so far out of whack, so absolutely fundamentally wrong that it must be stopped.

I think I've found it.

If you want to send me a letter here, you can't. Well, you can, but you would have to direct it to the post office. Why? Because my road doesn't have a name. Or if it does, no one knows it. There are no numbers. There are no letterboxes (and I don't mean pillarboxes, I mean letterboxes on the doors). My home address is: 100m to the north and 100m to the west of Palí, Novacentro, Guadalupe, San José. Why am I not afraid to post that on the web? Because there's no way you'll find it. Because all my address means is that I live 100m northwest of a pet supermarket in a shopping centre in a certain area of San José.

No one knows where anything is here. Just where it is in relation to something else. Which you can get used to, although it's not easy. My problem is that I don't know which way's south, north, east, west. So that's bad enough, and because everything is so short here, there's nothing like the Wharf or Empire State Building to orientate yourself around.

However, the icing on the cake. I am going to visit a B&B for M and I to possibly stay at next week. I found it in the Rough Guide, and it sounds fairly nice - pretty garden, near university (which is where I work), cheap. The address is 50m south of the antiguo higuerón. Which means old fig tree. Except by old, they don't mean that it's been there a long time. They mean that it's not actually there anymore. So I have to find this place by looking for something that is no longer extant and the location of which I didn't know in the first place.

If the US is going to insist Costa Rica should sign the TLC (making, by the way, it a treaty for CR but only an "accord" for the USA - nice, nice), they should make the renovation of street names and numbers their utmost priority. However, one of my Oprah moments yet again - something comes along to remind you that for some, roads, regardless of names, are a luxury.