Off the Grid

When the March earthquake hit, I stood on my school’s football field amidst students, their parents, and my colleagues. The ground continued to roll under out feet while everyone tried to track down information on their iPhones. When anyone discovered new information, they would shout out, “7.9 off Sendai!” or “Now they’re calling it 8.9!”

At that time, we hadn’t the slightest inkling of what was to come. We had no way to know that so many would suffer so horribly, but as details began to surface, we were able to access the facts quickly. This was one of those moments when any lingering apprehension I may have had about the role of technology in our lives completely disappeared. For better or worse, the internet was nothing short of miraculous in that moment. It wasn’t so long ago that we would have been standing on that field with no clue as to what was happening. In the fairly recent past, living the expat life involved a willingness to go off the grid.

When my husband and I first lived abroad, we travelled to Costa Rica with the knowledge that expensive long distance phone calls would be the sum total of our contact with life in the United States. Any business we had back home had to be completed before we left. Our credit cards had to be paid off because there was no online banking. My parents took over my measly $30 per month student loan payment. In terms of dealing with some aspects of our lives, it would be as if we no longer existed.

When the occasional Costa Rican earthquake registered high enough to make CNN, it would send our families into a tailspin. If they learned about it while we were at work, they would have to wait for hours for us to get home and answer their phone calls. There was almost no email, no Facebook, and no texting. There was nothing for anyone to do but worry. Meanwhile, we didn’t have CNN, so we had no idea that the little shake we felt earlier was sending our loved ones over the edge. There was a distinct possibility that as people frantically left messages on our answering machine, we might be in a local bar with our friends eating fried yucca and drinking rum and coke, our only care in the world being a decision as to whether or not we should order another round.

Many years later, I sometimes weigh the pros and cons of incorporating so much technology into living abroad. The expat experience is no longer a disappearing act. We are back on the grid, but now I’m doing something I always said I wouldn’t do. I live in a country where I don’t speak the language. I could make a million excuses, but the truth is that it’s my own fault. I use digital access to English information about Japan as a crutch to avoid learning the language. I showed up here with books on Japan and Japanese that I now only use to convert Farenheit to Celcius when I bake. I bought language CDs that I don’t listen to. My kanji workbooks are in pristine condition. For seven years, I’ve used technology to avoid having to put in the work of learning the language.

I’m not saying I miss the days in Costa Rica when I would plan a trip by thumbing through a friend’s much borrowed copy of Frommer’s or Lonely Planet. As my household’s designated Spanish speaker (notice that I didn’t say skilled), I would call our short list of hotels with the telephone in one ear in and my husband, Rob, in the other.

“Ask them if they have hot water,” Rob would suggest. I would translate the question, but before I could translate the answer, he would say, “Ask them how far they are from the beach.” So far, my brain could handle the load. “Ask them if they have a refrigerator.” About here, I would start to fall behind. “Is there a restaurant in the hotel? A bar? Are they close to town? Will we see monkeys?” At that point, I would be in complete dual language overload, my mental skills diminished to those of a small child by excessive input. These sessions usually didn’t end in violence unless Rob waited for me hang up to say, “Will you call them back and ask what floor our room is on?”

Repeat that process for every hotel we were even considering. It was time-consuming and unreliable, but I was practicing more Spanish with every call. Every daily task added to our knowledge of the country and the language. In time, this immersion resulted in both of us being relatively functional in Spanish. Using technology to skirt speaking the language wasn’t possible.

I’m not blaming my ignorance of Japanese on technology completely, but it’s one hell of an enabler for the lazy, isn’t it? In 2011, if I want a hotel room, I never have to speak to a human. I can go to one of many travel sites and input my needs and wants. Over time, I have found that I can systematically eliminate the need for Japanese by using my iPhone and computer. Pizza delivery, train schedules, and restaurant reservations are just an English website away. Now I don’t even have to ask for directions. I can put my location and my destination into my phone and a purple line will appear on my map, linking the two. It’s like when kindergartners on a field trip hold onto a rope held by their teacher. There’s even a blue dot to represent my current location so that I can see if I accidentally let go of my virtual rope. (Even with this, I still get lost in the labyrinth that is Shimokitazawa.)

Should I unplug and let myself flounder around in a sea of embarrassing pantomime until I learn the language? Probably, but I know I won’t. What I absolutely should do, though, is buckle down and study. Living abroad has changed with the times. Because it’s now so easy to avoid learning, I’ll need to go out of my way to create situations where I’m forced to speak Japanese.



I need to balance my own efforts with my easy tech cheats because to unplug would be an unthinkable sacrifice. To throw oneself back into the information dark ages (the nineties) would be to change everything about the way we’ve learned to interact with our environment.



Ultimately, the most important role technology can play for an expat family is the ability to stand, wherever we are, in a cloud of earthquake-induced uncertainty, and send an email or status update that guarantees that our loved ones will wake up to two words: We’re safe.

Vocanoes Always Sneak Up on Me

Originally published in Being A Broad Magazine

Volcanoes always sneak up on me. Any volcano, anywhere in the world; one minute we’re driving along, enjoying the scenery, and the next minute we turn a corner and there it is. Sometimes I’ve caught a glimpse of it a few miles back from an angle that made it seem smaller and yet I knew I would get there eventually. Nonetheless, regardless of how prepared I am, when it is suddenly right there the shock of having to crane my neck to see the top takes me by surprise every time. Mountains are beautiful, too, but there’s something about the way a cone volcano dominates the landscape that gets me every time.
For me, seeing Fuji was the fail-safe of our last family outing. When we accepted an invitation to join friends on a ski trip, I figured that whether or not I enjoyed the skiing, it would be great to be that close to Fuji. I’d never seen this particular Japanese national treasure up close. Besides, what could go wrong? Just because three out of four members of our family couldn’t ski, that didn’t mean we all couldn’t learn in one day. Worst case scenario, Rob would take our third-grader, Max, and I’d just figure it out quickly and take over teaching four-year-old Maya. I’m a smart, coordinated, grown woman. Why shouldn’t I be able to master the fine art of sliding down a hill by lunchtime?

One of the main reasons I never learned to ski is that I get really angry when I’m cold. Unfortunately, during the hour it took to fill out ski rental forms, measure each member of our family for clothes and boots, and wrestle said items onto our children, I got really, really cold. After much grumbling and cursing on my part, we were eventually ready to hit the bunny hill. We clicked into our skis, excited to swoosh over to the moving sidewalk that would usher us up the 100-foot, 20-degree slope that would be our training ground, only to find that the kids and I couldn’t move at all. Even the slightest upward incline made me slide backward after every step. Rob helped the kids while I pushed myself along with my poles. For the sake of the kids, I resisted the urge to shout obscenities.

Once I was on the moving sidewalk and could calm down for a second, I watched the Japanese kids on the slope with their parents, zipping around tiny obstacles and laughing. The image of them frolicking with Fuji in the background tugged my heart strings. It was so easy to picture Maya, who is strong and athletic, doing the same by the end of the day. I gazed up the hill to where Rob was waiting for us and focused my energy on trying to telepathically channel my “Maya as fabulous ski baby” vision to him. Instead of mirroring my dreamy look, he pointed behind me frantically. Looking down, I realised that Maya was no longer on the belt. In a second, Rob was behind me and able to recover our missing offspring, who had fallen off the conveyor belt, skis and all, and had been behind me trying to crawl back on.

Soon we were at the top of the hill, ready to go. For the children’s sake, I tried to pretend the bunny hill didn’t look terrifying from the top, but it did. Rob worked with Max, and in some misguided leap into ridiculously poor judgment, I started down the hill with Maya. Thirty seconds later, we had two people down and Max plummeting toward certain death. All I remember is lying in the snow, all of my limbs bent the wrong way, thinking, “Save the children.” As Max needed an immediate rescue, Maya and I would have to wait. Parental triage goes like this: moving toward danger trumps age; if everyone is stationary, save the little one first. In an effort to help myself, I pushed my poles into the ground and pulled with my arms. Nothing. I tried to slide my leg to a better position to gain leverage, but my ski had dug a trench in the snow and trying to move my leg made my knee twist in way that it was never meant to bend. As I was about to surrender, I saw a Japanese man watching me and grinning. It made sense that he would walk over and pull me up, right? Wrong. My brain flashed through seven years of lessons about Japanese culture and I realised in horror that he would never help me. As shamed as I may have been by my predicament, I was sure that he believed he would only deepen my humiliation by coming to my aid. For what felt like forever, he watched me struggle. I tried for the second time that day to telepathically communicate with someone. “For the love of God, deepen my humiliation!” I mentally pleaded. “It’s OK! Make my shame complete! Just help me!” I think, after this trip, that I can safely say that I suck at telepathy.

Rob had saved Max, and by the time I realised that I could release my boot from my ski, which is harder than it sounds when you can’t reach your feet, Maya had already taken off her skis and was walking down the hill. Skiing lasted approximately ten more minutes, less because the kids wanted to stop trying and more because Rob was simply outnumbered by beginners. Sledding was a more accomplishable goal since it gave the kids the thrill of rocketing downhill, but didn’t require lessons.

Right before we left, Maya took an interest in joining a gang of kids who were climbing a twenty-foot mini-Fuji, complete with a flag planted at the peak. Max climbed it in about 45 seconds, but for Maya’s little preschool legs, this was more of an undertaking. The picture of determination, she stubbornly tackled that thing from every conceivable angle. On most attempts, she would be within a metre or so of the top, only to lose her footing and slide all the way back down. Her tenacity was a sharp contrast to my willingness to give up on skiing. For the better part of an hour, she inched her way around, looking for the right approach, while I watched the clock, knowing that we had to leave soon and hating the idea of having to take her off her mountain before she reached the top. She’s much too stubborn to accept help, so all I could do was watch and cross my fingers for her. Finally, just as I was ready to break the news to her, she found a clean run and was at the top in the blink of an eye, sitting proudly with the other kids who had succeeded in scaling the mighty mini-Fuji. I called Rob and Max over to see her there, triumphant on her mountain of snow with the real Fuji looming large behind her, and I knew which mountain I preferred.

By giving my child an outlet for her tenacity, something she certainly didn’t inherit from me, Fuji’s diminutive twin had made my day complete.

Like I said, volcanoes always sneak up on me.

Keep Your Shit Out of My Bubble

I have this theory about how people interact with each other.

Picture yourself encased in a big bubble- not a Bubble Boy bubble, just a soap bubble, but less penetrable.

Now put all of your shit in it. Your family, your kids, pets, your favorite music and books. The bubble starts to fill up pretty quickly and pretty soon, you're running out of space.

Now, wherever you go, that bubble goes with you. It's not heavy, since it's a theoretical bubble and those are weightless. Nonetheless, there's only so much room in there.

As you move through your day, people will continually try to put their shit in your bubble, and this isn't necessarily bad. Your best friend tells you about a fight with her husband. Strangers on the bus want to tell you about their sister-in-law's DUI. The check-out lady in Wal-Mart wants to share her experience with the brand of toilet paper you're buying. You have have to sort the good and the bad shit.

Everyone has a different idea of how much of other people's crap will fit in their bubble, and how much they're willing to let in. This is the difference between someone like my friend L and me. She must have a bigger bubble than I do. Maybe she paid for an upgrade. She'll listen to people and try to wiggle their stories into her her existence. She'll eek out that last little bit of space between her sister's marriage and her daughter's wardrobe worries to squeeze you in. This is the mark of a compassionate human.

I think my bubble shrunk in the wash.

As I get older, I'm more selective about what's allowed in. I used to allow all sorts of debris that fell off other people's emotional journeys, but now that I'm forty, I've declared a moritorium on putting your shit in my bubble unless I invite it. That includes people who make others feel bad by being icy and discourteous. Your disfunction will not litter the floor of my bubble. It also includes the personal lives of strangers. A light anecdote, yes, by all means, but a complete counseling sessions and all the remnants of which will haunt my bubble, forget it. The puppy kickers of the world, who want to channel all of the frustration and confusion in their lives onto an unwitting target- I am no longer your bitch.

Friends and loved one, please come in. Fill my bubble with your joy and your woes. Leave your legos and stuffed pink bunnies all of the floor of my bubble.

To the uninvited, I'm cleaning house.

Double Dare



Of all the classes I took in college, or at least the ones I attended on a regular basis, my sociology class stuck with me above all others. It wasn’t because I was particularly social or tapped in to the inner workings of society. Rather, it was the societal theories of Erik Erikson that drew me in. He claimed that a society adjusts gradually, expanding the boundaries of acceptable levels of change according to gradually increasing familiarity with the everyday. This theory always made me picture little concentric circles expanding as a group of people felt the need to try new things and ideas.


At the time, I had a gorgeous Russian Blue kitten named Bella that I had rescued from the local pound. Sometimes I would let her snoop around in the back yard of my apartment, knowing that she, like Erikson’s emerging societies, would not increase her range of movement until every millimeter of her current comfort zone had been explored. Only then would she need or want to push further. It took about a week for her to claim not only the backyard, but the entire neighborhood as well. After two weeks, no bird was safe in a two block radius around my apartment.

In the many years that have passed since then, I’ve seen the same pattern that I saw with my kitten mimicked in the lives of the people around me to varying degrees. Societies, for better or worse, will always move forward. So will cats. Individual people, though, tend to have different ideas on this. Some take a lifetime to investigate a small space. Some absorb what they can rapidly and are ready to move on to the next challenge. Those of us who live abroad often fall into the latter category. The difference is that the world is our backyard. I guess our level of respect for the local fauna varies on a case-by-case basis.

Jumping from one circle of experience to the next in the way that we do when we move abroad lets people know in a big hurry whether they are meant to draw their happiness from their immediate surroundings on a long-term basis or move on to something new. It’s important to remember that moving away doesn’t necessarily mean moving forward. We give things up in order to be in a new place. I had to give away Bella when we moved to Costa Rica. We gave up our first house to move to Japan. Now we live far from our families and try to create community amongst the new people we meet, many of whom move away shortly after we’ve made them part of who we are. This life is not for everyone, and it’s easy to spot those who aren’t going to make it. When you meet people who have recently arrived and refuse to explore their new surroundings with any enthusiasm or curiosity, you know that they were never meant to leave the circle they inhabited back home for any considerable length of time. They were happiest amongst familiar things. That was enough, and they should be allowed to remain there and be happy. I fully support those who simply say that the life of a cultural nomad is not for them.

Some of my husband’s relatives once visited us in Costa Rica, kids in tow, and the mom immediately began a feeble attempt to create a dietary Tulsa in the on the beaches of Central America. She could find the most North American thing on any menu. The husband on the other hand, tried to give her a heart attack by gravitating in completely the opposite direction. When he even mentioned the idea of trying oxtail soup, her eyes nearly rolled back in her head and got stuck. “He always does this,” she said. “He always wants to eat the weird food.”

Out of politeness, I bit my tongue to keep from screaming, “Order the freakin’ oxtail. Get ALL the weird food.” But I didn’t. I watched the mom and kids live on white bread, Cokes, and fettucine alfredo for a week. Physically, they were stepping out of their circle, but mentally, they were still in Tulsa. But you know what? As much as it pains me to admit it, what she was doing qualified as branching out beyond her daily existence. She went to the rainforest, saw a volcano and splashed in tropical waters. Just because she didn’t dive into the experience as hard as I’m likely to do didn’t invalidate the effort.

So why are some of us willing to do what it takes to jump to that next circle of experience over and over again? We don’t love the things we’ve left any less. Perhaps we’re easily bored or have become addicted to the thrill of new adventures. Maybe it’s our job to muddle through the cultural quagmire that is human experience, have little bicultural kids, and generation after generation make the world a little smaller and more compassionate. Hopefully, when my kids reach my age, society will have pushed past the circle that contains so much hate and contentiousness, and nudged ever so slightly into a circle where people make an effort to understand each other’s cultural identities.

Perhaps if we make a habit of broadening our cultural empathy whenever we can, we’ll be able to look more kindly upon those who travel abroad to increase their family’s chance of survival. I moved to Japan because this is the best way for me to earn enough money to raise my children in relative comfort. When I do it, people say that I’m brave and adventurous. When people from impoverished nations move abroad to work and try to better their situation, they are arrested. I know it’s more complicated than that, but that’s partially because we’ve so heavily staked our claim to our own little circle.

So here’s the point. I believe that we can all move beyond our tiny circles in little ways. There is absolutely no reason anyone has to give up a beloved pet and move to the other side of the world to make this happen. We can show our children the value of stepping out of our comfort zones more easily than that. Take guitar lessons at forty. Sing karaoke so badly that you’re embarrassed to leave your house for a few days. Eat the freakin’ oxtail.

I double dare you.

Fish are Shitty Models

We aren't allowed to have pets in our house. It says so right in our lease. The lease also prohibits the wearing of shoes in the house- seriously, I about fell over when I saw that, but it does.

Max and Maya were desperate for a pet, so when my friend L, you know, the one who got worms in Mongolia, told me the science department was giving away a couple of Beta fish, I thought, what the hell, right? I figured just watching the kids name it would be fascinating, since they would have to agree on something, and anyone with more than one kid knows that siblings agreeing on anything is whole psych study in itself. I picked out a pretty blue fish and brought it home in a little temporary tank.

Max totally passed the good brother test. Rob offered to let Max just name the fish, since he was the first to see the new pet. "No," Max said, "I'd rather wait and let Maya help."

That was great, but when the time came and they both had their tiny eyes glued to the little tank, Max decided that it should be named William. Maya didn't like it. Not one bit. Telling her that they have a cousin named William who's pretty cool and will probably  be a rock star some day didn't convince her.

Here's the thing. The fact that Max chose a name at all was shocking. He's famously indecisive, so we weren't going to dismiss his choice. Maya is famously decisive. She makes up her mind in 5 seconds flat and never changes it- ever.

After all day of putting out the little fires of elementary school students, the last thing I want to deal with at home is fighting kids. I listen to kids whine and fight all day. At home, I'm tired and I want some freakin' peace- at any price. So, I asked Maya what name she wanted and figured we could combine the names.

True to her nature, she thought for a whole half of a second and said, "Kekko." End of story.

So here we are. Meet William Kekko (pronounced cake-o). He's pretty, but he won't hold still for a picture. I ended up with about twelve pictures of his ass and this one.

Rob tried to tame the name- he proposed B.K. as a nickname- you know, like Billy Kekko. But I was so amused that the kids said the whole thing every time they referred to WIlliam Kekko, and tickled that our fish had possibly the most unusual fish name ever, that we finally chose not to shorten it.

The kids love William Kekko. It's cool enough that there's a non-human living creature in our house, but this one is ubercool because you can mess with him. He doesn't like fish-shaped objects or the color red, so sometimes I walk into the kitchen to find Maya holding things up to his tank to see if they'll piss him off. She holds a red fridge magnet next to the tank and he puffs out his gills to look big. Maya says, "Look, Mommy, the magnet makes WIlliam Kekko mad!" When she looks at me with that little sadistic glint in her eyes, I feel so proud, because, after all, she learned the fine art of fish torture from me.

Rob says it's kind of messed up that I get so fascinated by messing with a fish, but really, we're doing William Kekko a favor. I mean, if no one pisses him off and he ends up in a big fish confrontation, he might find he's forgetten his aggressive instincts and he'd get picked apart. We're actually honing his skills. Unless he has a fishy heart attack over an Anpanman magnet, then that would be bad.

So we have a pet who never wears his shoes in the house and if we have a home invasion perpetrated by fish, he'll totally kick their ass. What more could we ask for?

Sentimental Ramblings

After twenty-seven years of not knowing how to take charge of my own existence, that first day in Costa Rica ranks high on my list of significant memories. It is with me as one of those pivotal moments when I knew that my life was not what is was a day ago, that you can never go back and be the same person. After twenty-four hours in Central America and the rush of actually doing something I said I was going to do for the first time ever, I was changed. I was never one to put much faith in chance or look for signs in what came to pass. Nonetheless, our arrival in Costa Rica, from the very first moment, unfolded as if designed to ease our minds and let us know that we’d made the right choice.


In the San Jose airport, there was a system in place to determine who would be searched for illegal goods, one that eventually seemed almost normal to us. Once we had our luggage, we would drag it over to the search line, where we would each take our chances with what was basically a giant stop light, except it had no yellow. When a button was pushed, a green light allowed us to keep walking. A red light meant that your bags would be searched. In over three years of flying into the country, we never got a red light. We were always told to move forward unchecked.

Our friends Jasmine and Gustavo had broken up by the time we made our move to San Jose. In a sense, she got us in the break-up, and we never saw him again. When we’d visited six months ago, they picked us up at the airport. This time, now that we were bringing our four massive suitcases and our life savings to stay for the long haul, we were on our own. We changed some dollars for colones and found a taxi that looked as if could bear the weight of our over-packed suitcases. For the entirety of the forty minute ride to Jasmine’s new apartment, we pressed our faces up against the car windows, pointing out to each other each exotic sight: little white farm trucks transporting tropical fruit, palm trees, tiny little houses with a porch made of gleaming, waxed tiles. In our time there, one would think I would become less fascinated by these things, but I didn’t. Even in my memory, the visual landscape of daily life in Central America has the power to entrance and calm me.

Jasmine had warned us that she wasn’t sure how long she could put us up. She had a small apartment that she shared with two other girls. When we arrived that night, we were welcomed with hugs and beers. We met people who seemed so worldly, so far beyond our petty observations in that taxi on the way there. They had seen all this and so much more. English and Spanish overlapped as people came and went from the apartment. I would love to say that I remember everyone I met that night, but I only remember Juanita. For no reason in particular, she gave me the impression that she wasn’t to be trusted. I was right.

The next morning, Rob made me get my hung over ass off the mattress-on-the-floor bed in Jasmine’s spare room to meet her friend Carlos, who knew of a vacant apartment in his building. Left to my own devices, I probably would have left that small task for a day when I wasn’t completely overwhelmed by everything in Jasmine’s kitchen that was different than the United States. I think I spent twenty minutes looking in Jasmine’s refrigerator, inspecting the milk in a box and the sour cream in a bag. Once I saw the coffee maker that looked like a bug net suspended over a cup, my day was planned. Rob had to drag me away when I discovered that Costa Rican limes have orange rinds instead of green.

Not being one to coddle, Jasmine sent us off walking to meet Carlos, a quickly sketched map in our hands and a distinct fear of becoming so lost that we were never found in the front of our minds. This is a country with no addresses. Literally. There’s no mail service, so there’s no reason to start naming streets and putting numbers on buildings. All directions are given by landmarks. In one suburb of San Jose, it’s common to give directions based on the location of a local resident’s red Camaro. Some of the landmarks haven’t existed in years. Because of the national reliance on landmarks to find any location, it is illegal for a business to change its name, even in the event that it becomes a completely different business. If Julio’s Liquor Store went out of business and a daycare opened in that building, the daycare would legally have to be called Julio’s Liquor Store.

We became pretty hopelessly lost on our way to find Carlos. We made it down the hill, turned right at the soccer field, cut across the vacant lot, and past the brown apartment building, but after that, the map deteriorated into a random collection of scratch marks as if Jasmine had run out of lost interest in the map before she got us all the way there.

As always happens when one gets lost upon arriving in a place that they will someday know by heart, we later realized that we had been walking in a circle around our destination. While poor Carlos stood waiting on the sidewalk in front of his building, we missed him on every lap around the neighborhood as we tested every street except for the correct one. Eventually, he spotted us, flagged us down, and took us to his landlord. If we took the apartment, we’d be right across the hall from him.

We looked at the apartment and sat for what seemed like hours, listening to the terms of rental. To this day, the only thing I can recall of what we were told was that we were lucky that she had an extra phone line we could rent. Apparently, a phone line in Costa Rica was an actual cord that you could own, and even take with you when you moved. If you were lucky enough to find a free one available for purchase in the first place. The amount of bribes involved in the acquisition of a phone line made it a valuable thing, indeed.

We took the apartment and rented the phone line.

I think it may have taken us fifteen minutes to unpack once we moved our four suitcases from Jasmine’s house to our own. It was, after all, only four suitcases. Even in the days before insane luggage restrictions, that’s about three hundred pounds of clothes, a boom box, and the Timberland boots that we thought we’d need for all the hiking we’d be doing. We tucked everything away in our one bedroom, furnished, windowless apartment and sat down on the couch, which we would soon discover I was insanely allergic to, and waited for our new lives to begin.

We sat there for quite a while. We had already been lost once that day and were hesitant to venture out and not be able to find our way back. Rob put on some music to make it feel homey. We talked about buying food at the nearby grocery store, but Jasmine was coming later to take us to dinner. We had books, but it seemed vaguely pathetic to ditch your life, move abroad, and spend the first night reading. We tried chatting, but there was so much that we didn’t know that we weren’t sure what to say.

So we waited.

Shortly before Jasmine was due to arrive, the doorbell rang. Excited, we grabbed the many keys it took to get into or out of the building and rushed downstairs, unlocked the first set of deadbolts on the inner door of the building and fumbled for the keys to the locks on the outer gate. When we threw back the door, there was a tall brunette who was clearly not Jasmine. Before we could even laugh at ourselves for being so frantic only find that it was someone ringing the wrong buzzer, the girl held up a bottle of rum and said, “Hi. I’m Margarita. I’m one of your new friends.”

Over the course of the next hour, our apartment gradually filled with people, all of whom showed up with a bottle of rum and declared themselves to be our friends. By the time Jasmine arrived, we were half in the bag and in love with our new social circle. She was intentionally late so that everyone would have a chance to arrive before she did. There was nothing Jasmine could have done to better highlight the shift between what our reality had so recently been and what it was about to be than to surreptitiously fill our apartment with twenty strangers and our kitchen counter with Cuban rum.

Hide and Seek

I was twenty-seven years old the year Rob and I took a leap into the unknown that would change our lives forever. We’d been married for four years and had managed to get ourselves into a hopelessly bizarre life from which there was no escape. If our lives were a game, we were at that point when you’ve made so many questionable decisions that nothing short of a complete do-over could rescue us, as if we were playing hide-and-seek with ourselves and lost. I had managed to find the worst waitressing job in Northfield, Minnesota and he was a retail manager in an outlet mall in the middle of nowhere. Our only friends in the state, Shauna and Gustavo, had just moved to Costa Rica, leaving us alone in a remote blue collar town, watching it snow eight months of the year. There was no stroke of good fortune, no cashing in on some hidden ability in our future. Nothing was going to improve.


The moment that we started to realize that it was time to get off our asses and change our lives snuck up on us late one night toward the tail end of our seemingly once-in-a-lifetime vacation in Costa Rica. We were sitting in Los Balcones, an open-air restaurant on the second floor of a shopping complex called El Pueblo. It was an enclosed shopping district built in traditional Costa Rican style, white stucco and tropical wood. We sat on the balcony of the restaurant with Shauna, Gustavo, and their circle of close friends around a long table covered with corn tortillas, freshly grilled meats, a bottle of Cuban rum, an enormous cache of empty bottles of local beer that continued to grow over the evening, as the Tico way of tabulating a bar bill is to count the empties at the end of the night. Clearing away the bottles would screw up the whole system. Below us, we could look down on the stream of people and cars as they wound their way in and out of the complex, through the palm trees that lined the street. Everything was different here, even the air smelled tropical, warm and clean. It smelled like hope and adventure. Every second of just being there was soothing, and it was enormously different from the pointlessness of the life to which we were about to return.

Just that afternoon, we’d returned from a road trip the central part of the country where we’d watched an active volcano explode, fireworks, ash clouds and the whole show. Earlier in the week, we’d baked in the sun on the pristeen beaches of Manual Antonio and hiked in the Braujillio Carillo rainforest. This was not just a vacation. This was an education in all of the things we’d deprived ourselves of without even knowing we were doing so. Each small pleasure pointed to our failure to achieve true contentment in our daily lives. Maybe the lesson we needed to learn was bubbling under the surface all week, but it really came down to a single moment of that evening in Los Balcones, at the tail end of our vacation. That was the night, just as we were about to return to our normal, mundane existence, that we came into the life-altering knowledge that we’d been living wrong.

It wasn’t Shauna and Gustavo who clued us in. It was their friend Paul. All we needed to hear was one simple sentence.

“You can live here on four hundred dollars a month.” Paul told us as he casually mixed himself another rum and coke. Nothing is his demeanor showed an awareness that this announcement would change our lives.

That was it. In that short sentence, the world opened up to us. We could be poor anywhere. Why did we need to work our tails off in town we hated, just so we could be broke all the time. We had no children, responsibilities, or aspirations; no reason whatsoever to continue the path we were on. Maybe we had been looking for what our lives would become in all the wrong places. We limited our search to our immediate surroundings, when perhaps it was never there. Perhaps it was out in the wide world that we’d never seen.

Paul continued to tell us about the reality of living in Costa Rica. Any native speaker of English could find a teaching job. As a couple sharing an apartment and therefore the rent, we would still have to eat a lot of rice and beans and live like backpackers, but we could survive. We could hold the feeling we were experiencing at that moment indefinitely.

At the time, we didn’t discuss it. In the years since then, we’ve talked about that conversation, about how we both felt the appeal of breaking out into the world, but for some reason, our usual couple ESP failed us. Whatever yearning to step up to a life of new adventures we felt, we kept it quiet. I thought I was being uncharacteristically sensible. I have a long history of making pronouncements I didn’t follow through. There was always something crazy I wanted to try, someplace I wanted to run off to. Wherever I was, I was sure that something better was out there, waiting to be chased down. That night in Costa Rica, I kept my urges to myself. I’d piped up too many times to be taken seriously again. But I kept the idea of Costa Rica stored in a corner of mind for weeks after we returned, like a squirrel with a nut in his cheek. Everything else that I thought about had to get past this idea that I had another choice. Daily aggravations, blizzard-impeded drives to work, the bills that kept coming to make us pay for a life we didn’t love. Instead of passively accepting these things, I now thought, “Maybe I don’t have to do this anymore.”

It was after I had a little fender bender on an icy street that we finally broke our silence. Once the decision to chuck it all and move was made, we never looked back. Soon tickets were purchased, belongings were sold or stored, and we were on our way. It was like starting our lives over together. Being a couple was never a question. We were in that for good, regardless of the circumstances. Since we left Minnesota, through all of the adventures we’ve had since, we’ve held on to one source of security. If we are together, we can make a home wherever we choose.

Hopefully, the choices we've made will empower our kids. They'll always know that they're options are inexhaustible. They will have seen enough of the world to look for opportunity beyond their surroundings.