Don Mateo

Facebook has numerous pages catering to the foreign community in Costa Rica. There are always a number of posts from people thinking about moving to or visiting Costa Rica, and their “what’s it like?” questions. Responses vary. One recent post caught my eye when a responder—almost certainly an estadounidense—described Costa […]

Feliz Navidad! Is it too early to say that? Nah– It is now officially Christmas season. Unofficially, it started sometime in October. I saw Christmas decorations in stores and the occasional house festooned with lights sometime before the first of November. The park in town got its lights strung this […]

Beans, beans, the magical fruit…remember that little ditty? The more you eat the more you toot, the more you toot the better you feel, so let’s have beans for every meal! Besides the fact that beans are a legume, not a fruit, and “toot” is a weird euphemism (and for […]

After 25 years of residency in Costa Rica, I became a temporary tourist. My cedula expired, and the caja and I are a couple million colones apart on what they say I owe. To keep my U.S. passport up to date and my status in the country legal, I made […]

If you live in a predominantly Tico barrio, you are likely familiar with vendedores ambulantes. These are the door-to-door salespeople who pass through selling eggs, mora, pejibaye, mamón chino, tamales, tomates, pasteles, and mucho mucho más. They may be on foot or in a vehicle that slowly passes by the […]

“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof” – Feodor Dostoevsky. In the early 1990s, I spent most of a year in a rural area of Costa Rica, caretaking a property that had been carved out of the jungle a couple of decades before by an energetic North American. The small […]

Several years ago, I started a job that required me to spend the first two months in a small town near Volcan Arenal. It was November, and the days were misty and cloud-covered. Outside of the town, there were intriguing signs pointing to a mysterious lake where there had once […]

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign, blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind– that was the chorus of a popular song a while back. That refrain runs through my head any time I walk around the barrio. One thing is clear: Street signs in Costa Rica have a hard life. Between […]

Did you know that Costa Rica is the only country in the Americas with an official religion? Our national religion–no, it’s not fútbol or bureaucracy–is Catholicism, as defined by Article 75 of the Constitution of Costa Rica. From the smallest rural towns defined by a soccer field, a pulpería, and […]

I am sometimes accused of being overly negative and sarcastic in my writings about Costa Rica and my life here. Fair enough, though anyone who knows me could vouch that I can be equally negative and sarcastic about my home country of the United States. Having said that, here is […]