An Authentic American Experience Abroad

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Perusing travel websites, and travel blogs, and reading excerpts from travel books, there seems to be a recurring, inevitable theme. And every story starts the same way: So-and-so finally did what most people only dream about. He left behind the world of advertising and fifty-hour workweeks and followed his heart. With only three-hundred dollars in his pocket, so-and-so bought a one way ticket to (insert country full of brown people here). With a backpack and thirst for adventure, he set out in this unfamiliar land to find things he never dreamed possible. He made many friends along the way, had better experiences than you ever will, and finally discovered who he really was.

This everyman traveler has a beard, is probably white, and has an oddly thick amount of forearm hair. When you read his book you are supposed to wish you were him, and admire the freewheeling audacity of someone adventurous enough to leave it all behind. You whisper a silent promise to get a passport one of these days, then tell one person about the book at work before forgetting all about it.

I’ve had this guy in my head for the last three weeks as I’ve acclimated myself to life abroad. I wonder what it is I’m going to learn, and what life-changing epiphanies I’m going to have in the coming months. And so it was that we decided to do something exciting for our last Friday night in San Jose.

Alisa and I decided to splurge and go out to a Jazz club down the street from the University of Costa Rica. It came highly recommended from my profesora. We invited our Swiss friend Yolanda. Like the other Swiss folks we’ve met, Yolanda is learning Spanish because the crappy schools in Europe only produce ses-lingual students. I don’t know if that is the proper term for someone who speaks six languages because I am not even very good at English.

We also invited another American, Dylan, who had just completed his first week of Spanish studies. Amazingly, he knew less Spanish than me, and had immediately begun to bridge the language gap by employing the same strategy I had mastered—when they don’t understand, just speak English louder. It’s great. Once your voice gets to an all out yell, whoever you’re talking to will just nod their head and leave you alone. Unless it’s a waiter, or a doctor, it won’t matter if they come back or not.

And so the four of us decided to meet at the Jazz Café at 8 o’clock. The rain was so hard and heavy it seemed like it might break through the roof of the cab. After three weeks of cab rides in San Jose, the drive was almost nostalgic. Like veterans remembering the wonderful obstacles they had overcome during battle, every skidding swerve toward pedestrians with their backs turned made Alisa and I smile at one another in a sad remembrance.

Dylan was twenty minutes late, and probably paid twice as much as he should have because he didn’t have any idea how to travel via Costa Rican cab. The entire time we waited under the overhang in the rain, just outside of the restaurant, we imagined the different parts of San Jose Dylan was getting to see.

“I bet he’s in Hatillo right now,” Alisa said, “and the cab driver is trying to scare him into trusting him, so he’ll get a tip.”

“Well, he’s having a funner time than we are then, standing here in the rain,” I said.

“More fun,” Yolanda told me. “There is no such word in your language as ‘funner.’”

“More fun,” I said in a whisper, trying to get it to stick in my head like the millions of irregular verb conjugations in Spanish. “Thanks.”

Dylan finally arrived and gave the driver a big tip. When we told him you don’t have to tip in Costa Rica, he said, “I do pretty well in the states, so I don’t mind, you know…”

The Jazz Café was empty this early. It didn’t look like they served dinner. There was only the show, which the hostess informed us started at 9:30. Tickets were about $15 USD, or ¢8,000 colones. We walked down the street and found a top-notch sushi restaurant where there was a wait.

“This is going to be just like a night at Yoshi’s,” I said.

“It’s a Jazz club in the Bay Area that also serves really good sushi,” Alisa informed our friends. “And if you eat dinner there, you get reserved seating for the show.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Yolanda. “That sounds wonderfully pleasant.”

“No shit!” said Dylan.

Dinner took forever, and three beers each and a bottle of sake later, it was 10:15. We were forty-five minutes late for the show. Walking in a heaping lurch, the four of us barged into the Jazz Café laughing at our Spanish accents. Unfortunately, the latin jazz quartet had just started a slow, soft ballad. Faces turned toward us in the darkness of the room in flitting, disapproving glares. Even the drummer and pianist sent their knotted eyebrows our way, to no avail.

We threw our tickets at the hostess and bumped our way through the maze of little chairs and round tables just big enough to hold the people and drinks on them. The place was packed with maybe two hundred people, and we slowly waded our way to the center of the mass. Every seat was filled with glaring apparitions in the dark room, only the light from the stage showed us the way.

“There’s one!” Dylan yelled. The rest of us found where his arm pointed, which was a large round bar table with six stools in the exact middle of the room. It was even on a raised platform. Miraculously, in this sea of Costa Ricans, was this untouched island, and without bothering to wonder why the best seat in the house stood unfilled, the four of us climbed atop the bar stools and opened up the drink menus.

“Uh-oh,” Yolanda whispered, “look at this.”

And there on the table, in the middle of two hundred jazz afficianados trying to listen to a soft serenade, was a large placard that said: RESERVADO Rachel Sanchez y 5 personas.
And the heads of those around us in the dark were shaking heads in Spanish whispers.

“Here’s what we’ll do with that,” said Dylan, and placed the ashtray and a set of silverware over the placard. “Now, do you think they’ve heard of Jack Daniels down here?”

Dylan was from Phoenix, and loved whiskey. Because he had sprung for the bottle of Sake at the sushi place, I told him I’d buy him a whiskey at the club. I said “a” whiskey, because I had a suspicion that with Dylan it would quickly turn plural. I was right.

The band continued its low wail, and even the most mortified patrons finally turned back to the show. It was a classic jazz rhythm section—drums, piano, and stand-up bass. The lead was playing clarinet when we got there, but switched between bass-clarinet and tenor sax throughout the night. He had this deep sound on all three instruments that wove a spell with every solo. His phrasing was precise and satisfyingly dissonant, and soon enough I was nodding my head in a dizzy satisfaction. Our drinks arrived right about the time our cameras came out.

After that first ballad, the band went into a jumping bop that reminded us all we had an experience to document so that it could be uploaded and shared. Alisa began taking individual shots of each of us, flash in full effect, before moving on to pairs, and threesomes, and finally the whole group. Yolanda was better at extending her arm out toward the band and pointing the camera back at us for the group shots, so Alisa had her do it. Then Yolanda did the same with her own camera.

“Don’t forget mine!” Dylan screamed over the band. For the last five minutes he had been checking out the celebrity statuettes that adorned the back walls on either side of the band. Because it was dark and they were so far away, he used the zoom function on his camera to get a better look at each one. “I think that one is Duke Ellington. And the one next to him…maybe Louis Armstrong?”

Our table flashed with so many lights in the dark room we were like a strobe light in the middle of the club. Only instead of on the center of the ceiling, we were in the center of the floor. And just when it seemed like there couldn’t possibly any more pictures to take, Alisa switched our camera to video and caught all seven minutes of the next song. We couldn’t stop talking about what a great picture our new camera could produce in the dark.

“Its too bad we’re so close to the stage,” Alisa yelled. “I don’t think the sound is going to come out very well.”

“Sorry honey, these were the only seats we could find.”

And the condensation from our drinks began to cover the table as it always does here, because of the humidity. Nothing stays cold for long, which is why the beer comes with ice. And Rachel Sanchez’s reservation placard began to get so wet and mushy I eventually just squished it into a muddy pulp and dropped it onto the ground.

I guess what they never tell you is the hairy guy gets on the plane with three hundred dollars in his pocket because that is how much cash everyone carries when entering a foreign country. What they never mention is the guy’s parents’ credit card is in his fanny pack. He is not on his own. If something happens he is a Western Union visit away from enough money to stay at the Ritz-Carlton.

You never hear about a black guy from the ghetto doing this. Without hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial parental support, the black guy from the ghetto knows that with just three hundred dollars, he probably isn’t going to make it back.

This cynical attitude makes me worry. What if I’m not cut out to be the clichéd guy who discovers the meaning of life while abroad. I have plenty of forearm hair, but sometimes I wonder if it’s truly sufficient. I bought a round trip ticket and have a chunk of money in the bank to make sure the only mud I’m going to be sleeping in is at a day-spa. I’m probably not going to have any great epiphanies, even if the weed turns out to be any good here.

At my age, the world doesn’t look as new as it used to. I’m a bald thirty-year-old traveling around with my wife. And we’re American. I don’t know if we’re going to learn anything new. Instead, we’re just going to act like we always do—which is a little bit crazy, a little bit drunk, and we’re going to make asses out of ourselves.

Our last day in San Jose didn’t involve any life lessons. There was no spirituality involved. We certainly didn’t learn anything about the world, or other people who are different from us. And I ask myself this very serious question: What if we are forever satisfied with getting the best seats in the house, even when we’re a drunk hour late?

By the time our third round of drinks arrived I had the perfect toast—“To Rachel Sanchez, and her five imaginary friends.” I said this during a pause in the music, you know, the pause that always happens when you are talking about the itch you’ve noticed on your genitals that Tinactin just won’t get rid of, and everyone turns to stare.

But we were beyond that. We were three Americans with a Swiss woman following our lead. “To Rachel!” We said, and laughed into our drinks as my wife took video.

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Photos

The bass player
He might have been good, we didn't really notice.

The whole group
Sometimes its nice always getting the best seats

Comments

[Jeremy Tanner]

Hijueputa Americans!!
Just kidding, really nice, I've met so many Dylans in Costa Rica and everywhere else that your descriptions had a huge smile on my face. So does this mean that you're calling it quits on Latin America or was this published before the Argentina leg of the trip? Happy travels my American friends, wish I could be there with you.. Jeremy

[pmacfar]

Cool
I'm still looking for a good jazz act in Tianjin. Not likely to find it, so it was great to read about this one.