Central America 6-30-08 ´to 7-27-08.

I arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica a couple of days ago amidst positive circumstances. My layover in Atlanta was to be 7 hours (the price to pay for cheap tickets) but the fine folks at DELTA overbooked the flight from Newark to ATL and asked if anyone could afford to arrive in ATL a little later. Being the experienced traveler Ive become, I knew free $ when I hear it. They offered me a 200$ DELTA voucher and a 7$ food voucher to arrive in ATL an hour or so later. This served to break up my hellish layover so I took it more for the 7$ than the ticket voucher. I spent the layover in ATL trying to get 100´s for the 20´s the ATM gave me in about 50 airport businesses. Starbucks proved most helpful while TGIFriday´s were d-bags. I ended up protesting Fridays on this account and landed in teh bar of a seafood chain that made delicious (if not expensive) bloody marys. I wouldn´t have had so much food and drink had I not had the false sense of entitlement that the 7$ food voucher gave me, ended up being an expensive layover. The flight itself was uneventful save for a decidedly bitchy stewardess who proved to be the only capable person at perpetually incompetent clusterF%$k that is DELTA. I arrived in San Jose and got bent over for a 22$ cab ride to my hostel. Not only that but my driver (despite his lucrative racket) couldn´t even find the hostel and I was relegated to what he knew, mainly a sh!thole with the unfortunate misnomer of ¨Tranquilo Backpackers Hostel.¨ For those of you too dimwitted to figure it out, tranquilo = tranquil IE: calm, peaceful, what have you. It was heralded in my travel guide as a laid back place with a cool vibe. Great! What this translates to in my world is this... I enter the gate and get the impression that fraudulent-dirty-hippy-white-dreadlocked bomb exploded in this place. it was chock full of human d-bags posed as worldly travelers. I was dressed half well for 1 reason. When I travel to Latin Countries, I try to appear respectable. This is because it seems insulting for someone who can afford to not work and gallivant across the globe to appear as they don´t respect the places where they´re traveling to enough to make any effort not to look dirty. Anyone who knows me knows I´m all about ¨doing you¨ which is to say ¨be yourself and don't cater to the whims or expectations of others.¨ This does not fully apply in poor countries. If you want to look homeless in NYC, be my guest, I will more than likely make a snide remark to myself or who I´m with but that's the extent of my concern for you or your dress. To understand what I´m saying it´s required you understand a basic truth in Latin America. A majority of people in these countries are what we would call ¨working poor¨... there is a small middle class, a huge impoverished class and a tiny upper class (with nearly all the wealth). Even for the working poor, there is a very evident pride among the people. Even after working crazy hours to barely put the rice and beans on teh table, they get get out the irons and the bleach and put on clothes that give them some semblance or self worth in a society that has largely turned its back on them. I am not being presumptuous in this observation. I take advantage of my white privilege to make a sincere effort to speak with people from all walks of life on my trips and have heard varying degrees of what I just stated. I just learned from a taxista in Nicaragua that they call backpackers ¨Johnnies¨because we walk everywhere (Johnnie Walker). These conversations over the years have led me to my current line of thinking. If you dress like these fake dirty hippies, you end up resembling the masses of the tragic children that beg in the streets for food or money to buy something to take the pain away. I think this is an insult to these kids who did nothing but be born into abject poverty. Ok enough ranting. Transvestite hooker story is on the way... check back manana.