El pollos, mas pollos
Begin on any corner in Liberia and walk to blocks in any direction. I can just about guarantee you will find a fast food chicken restaurant. With names like pollo loco and with such proliferation, there was no way we could say no to pollo. So for the first time we ordered in Spanish.
Okay, this isn't a big feat since I muddled throuh it. "Para mi", that much was okay. But choosing between fried and barbeque came down to pointing. The chicken isn't much better for being from Costa Rica. Fast food is fast food.
We spent most of the day exploring the city and napping with the fan on full blast inbetween our ventures. Around 1pm we asked the helpful woman at the front desk where the bus stop for Puntarenas was. Her directions set us on the right path but it was a good thing we went to scout it out first. Along the way we asked several people where we could find the bus. In Liberia, there are some streets hat seem to serve as unmarked stops. This would be unhelpful to two wayward tourists. After bumbling around with broken Spanish, we finally found the very distinct station (you know, with five buses and twenty people queing up under the covered waiting area). That's just he obvious sign we were hoping for. It sounds like the earliest bus to Puntarenas leaves at 5am. Hopefully we make it.
And now for the moment of nonresistance:
For dinner, Rick and I headed to a small sports bar (looking for anything other than chicken). Forgetting to bone up on our foods en espanol and not bringing the essential tool: a dictionary, we were left to our own critical thinking skills to decipher the menu. Imperial beer, THE beer of Costa Rica apparently, was a no brainer. Rick ordered a dish that had at least one word he knew: bisteka. I was excited by the possibility to try something totally new and surprising. I chose the item that I could not translate at all.
FYI, higado y encebollados means liver and onions.
Lesson learned: nonresistance does not mean blindly jumping all the time. Often, it's good to jump knowing something about the terrain you're about to land in, or at least about the inflight path. Other times you just don't know what's coming until your fall is miraculously cushioned by the pillows that were always there. Then again you might just land in a pile of fried liver.
Just because your blind jump didn't go as planned, you don't have to have a negative experience. I might never have tried liver and onions (and discovered that it might be even more gag-worthy than natto). The tortilla chips, salad, beer, chill, local atmosphere, and as always the company all more than made up for my translation impairment. And now I know the importance of learning this language as quickly as possible. Overthinking may be a product of an attitude of resistance to perpetuate a cycle of resistence, but thinking helps you make sound choices based firmly in knowledge. You can act without resistance without ordering liver.
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