Research About Costa Rica Part I

I've always had a tendency to over-prepare for trips. In the case of a three week long trip to a country I have never been to, I don't consider this as a character flaw. One of things I have been doing is trying to read anything I could get my hands on about Costa Rica. At some point, I had most of Elkhart's Public Library's books about Costa Rica. What's impressive is that I managed to get them all back without having a fine. I wish I could say the same about two videos from the university library.

Part of writing this blog is as a travel journal for this trip. I will turn that in to my professor after I return to show cultural and social observations made while in country. I've read travel guides, and books on history and customs, and anything I could find. One of the more interesting books I found was about called "Culture and Customs of Costa Rica". It is essentially an encyclopedia of customs, history and sociology.

Some things about a society cannot be learned through textbooks or guidebooks. How a group of people feels about life, love, and more eternal values can really only be found through art and literature. I found a book called "Costa Rica : A Traveler's Literary Companion" that was extremely helpful. It has stories from all regions of the country from all kinds of authors. This was the book that really helped explain feelings and beliefs in ways a guidebook cannot.

I've done some research on the web and by trying to talk to people that have lived in Costa Rica, or live there now. There are two english web newspapers in Costa Rica that have been very helpful: AM Costa Rica and the Tico Times, which is actually a print newspaper also-it is the most popular and oldest English paper in the country.

AM Costa Rica is geared more for the large group of ex-pats from the U.S. and Canada that live there. One of their columnists, Jo Stuart, was very gracious to me and answered a whole bunch of questions and even wrote a column based on our email conversations.

Here's the link to her article: "A Tico home stay can make you less tongue-tied.".

Read Part II of this post where I explain some of the things all this research taught me...

Juanito