Steven Seagal and Costa Rican Cake

I was watching TV last night with my host family, and on the news was none other than Steven Seagal, who is visiting Costa Rica right now. He got an audience with Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, and took up about 10 minutes on the 7 o'clock news. If Walter Centeno, the star midfielder of Saprissa, the kick-ass Costa Rican soccer team, visited the States, he wouldn't make the news or get an audience with the President. Just another one of those power things that reminds me how lopsided the world is.

It also occurred to me that I haven't written any blog posts on my blog yet – just thrown lots of essays and stories at you. So maybe I should back up a little bit.

I've been here a month now – almost four weeks in Monteverde, on top of the first week we spent in San Jose, the lowlands rainforest at Tirimbina, and Fortuna, where lake Arenal and the Arenal volcano are. I live with a great host family in Santa Elena, a town of about 4,000 where everyone is related to everyone.

My host parents, Elida y Eloy, are in their early seventies – more like my host grandparents. Eloy does some work on local farms depending on the day and the season, but otherwise tinkers around the house. Elida knits like it's nothing (purses and hats with her eyes closed) and cooks for the family, which takes up a solid portion of the day when you're working with a two burner stove connected to a portable propane tank, a microwave, and only two or three pots and pans. They have four sons, mostly in the forties, all of whom live and work on a farm in Upala, a town in the northern flatlands of Costa Rica, close to the border with Nicaragua. One of Elida's and Eloy's grandchildren, Bryan, has lived with them since he was three, when his parents got divorced. He's 14, and he's totally the cool kid – short spiked hair and Adidas and Puma track jackets all the time.

Bryan is a great translator – he helps my host parents figure out what I'm trying to say in Spanish, and explains to me some of what my host parents say in simpler Spanish. He's also a good translator of culture, and I'm not talking about mine: every night as they watch TV, he's explaining the facets of Costa Rican youth culture broadcast over the airways: reality TV shows, dubbed Simpsons episodes, and the most recent episode of ¿Quien Quiere Ser Millionario? to his grandparents, and to me.

This is such a different experience for me than my trip to Honduras in high school. I have my own room in the five-room house, and running water is potable and pretty consistent. We have electricity and cable TV, and Bryan has an old computer that he plays video games on (no internet, though).

Motorcycles are everywhere, which makes me real envious, and pretty much all boys, as well as many girls, learn to ride in their early teens. They ride in conditions I would never dream of riding in: mud, rain, and wind like none I have ever witnessed. Some of roads I walk on are like wind tunnels: in the morning I have to lean forward as I walk if I actually want to get anywhere, and in the evenings sometimes I have no control each step over where I actually put my foot down.

But the views are amazing. Every morning and every night we all walk along one section of road with a stunning view of the Gulf of Nicoya and the Nicoya Peninsula, which sits on the Pacific coast. If you leave the Institute at the right time in the afternoons, you catch an amazingly beautiful sunset, different every night. I worry that one of these days I'm going to start taking it for granted – as it is, sometimes I have to remind myself to pause for a minute and just watch.

In other news, you know when you cut a round cake, it's really hard to get it to look right, especially at the center where it gets really narrow? In Costa Rica, the first thing you do is cut a circle in the middle of the cake. You cut the outer ring first, and then the inside circle.

It works SO much better.

Or maybe I just don't know how to cut cake.