The word for today is Esperanza or Hope as we say in English. I made a vow to myself to try and speed up the process of learning Spanish during the time I am here. It’s truly amazing how much quicker you can pick up a language by being “immersed ” in it as they say. That being said, I will probably need to stay here another 3 years instead of 3 weeks! Today I had some business to take care of in San Isidro the biggest city near our house. I don’t really mind the hour and a half drive there because once you leave our coastal highway the remainder of the drive is winding up and down the mountains where the weather and views are spectacular. I just hope ( espero ) someday that someone else can drive so I can enjoy the scenery. Long story short, I had just 2 things to accomplish in the city today, one being getting a new corporation started along with a living will in case of my untimely demise and the other I can’t write about here. Needless to say both of these tasks needed the one thing that basically you need to get anything done in Costa Rica… documents. And documents with official stamps to boot. If a document has an official government stamp on it the world is your oyster. This is where the word of the day comes into play. While waiting for my lawyers office to reopen (they close for 2 hours during lunch) and while waiting for our food to get brought to our table that we were only eating because we also had to wait for the other set of documents from the first place we went, I decided to refresh my memory on the word for “to wait” . I know that was an awful long run on sentence but I warned you my grammar is terrible. The Spanish word for to wait is “esperar” . Makes sense to me, while you are waiting, you are also hoping that you don’t have to wait any longer. Not sure why our words for hope and to wait aren’t even close? Everything down here takes at the minimum twice as long to get done as it does in the States. I really hated this at first. It’s kinda that “we’ll get to it when we feel like getting to it ” attitude. The way I have been now looking at it is maybe we are often in too much of a rush all the time and maybe we all just need to slow down and do things more like Ticos. Enjoy life now, not later and maybe there will be Esperanza for us all.
Ps. This was a banner day. I actually got both things accomplished in one day. There’s hope for me too!