Blowin’ In the Wind
mbernhardt February 11, 2023 No Comments
When I write about travel, I like to focus on what really hits me. Writing (and hopefully reading) those stories is far more enjoyable than listicles or travelogues.
During our three days in Monteverde, Costa Rica, what hit me—in the face, 24 hours a day—was howling wind and sometimes, eye-stinging rain. I expected some gentle rain, and we had that too; after all, it’s a cloud forest. But the constant, window-rattling, 20-25 mph wind was so loud in our hotel room that we had to visit the farmacia and buy earplugs so we could sleep. …
Students from the 6th grade class at Escuela Primaria Juan de la Barrera waited eagerly for me to begin reading them a story. Aline Shapiro, an American librarian whose dream had been to build a children’s library at the school, introduced me as a guest reader from California and handed me a book entitled Coyote: Un cuento folclòrico del sudoeste de Estados Unidos. I was a little nervous as it was my first time reading a book aloud in Spanish. In the middle of the story, after stumbling over just a few words, I asked the children “Me comprenden? Do you understand me? I was happy to hear them answer “Si.” …
In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, nearly every beach has a broken-down little shack on it selling cheap rum, beer, and cocktails. A single sparsely-covered shelf on the back wall displays a few bottles. There’s usually one customer, a friend of the proprietor, perched on a barstool planted in the sand. They talk for a couple of hours in Creole until lunch, when the palm trees behind the shack no longer provide shade. The owner ducks under his counter, closes up the plywood shutter doors, and the two of them take off. A couple of hours later, the bar reopens and another friend visits until it shuts down for the night, just when a tourist like me might be looking for a drink.