mattbell | Nov. 19th, 2009

Nov. 19th, 2009

I took a couple of years of Spanish in middle school and a year of Spanish at the beginning of high school. Other than a couple of weeks in Spain at the end of high school, I really haven't used my Spanish knowledge at all since then. Given 14 years of almost total nonuse, it's amazing how quickly my brain was able to refresh all the necessary neural connections. My vocabulary seemed remarkably intact, though at first I could only access most of it via recognition rather than recall. This allowed me to understand what other people were saying but made answering them more difficult. I could listen to a local coffee farmer talk about the bean growing and roasting process but I had some trouble asking questions. My sentence construction (especially verb tense) was totally messy at frst, but got much better as time went on.

Trying to communicate with other people often felt like the real-time verbal version of the sort of engineering challenge where you have to build a working machine out of rubber bands and foamboard. I had to communicate complex concepts using a very small verbal toolkit, which led me to say things like "paper for cleaning hands" because I couldn't remember how to say "napkin".

In the beginning my brain did a lot of translating to and from English as I was conversing with people in Spanish. However, as common concepts and relations became reinforced, my brain started directly thinking and responding in Spanish without ever bothering to translate. This also caused me to have thoughts in Spanish even when I was'9t conversing with others. In a way, words in one language or anotther are just simply more vocabulary, like learning the items on a menu at a foreign restaurant or learning the medical names instead of the colloquial names for body parts. Of course their contextual uses are different, and thus you have to remember how they must be structured in sentences. I had a moment in which I was talking with a restaurant employee in a mixture of English and Spanish where I stopped even thinking about what language I was using... it was just words and concepts flowing back and forth.

One of the strangest language experiences was watching a movie that had a mixture of languages, all of which were subtitled in Spanish. When they were speaking English I listened but when it was another language I read the subtitles. It took a few seconds to switch back and forth. If I was reading the subtitles I wouldn't start processing the audio stream until I noticed it had switched back to English. This gives me the sense that there's only one language processing center, and trying to ram two continuous streams of information through it does not work well. In retrospect this is kind of obvious given that it is difficult for me to listen to an extended audio broadcast while reading, even when it's all in English.

Overall, I was really impressed by my brain's ability to quickly refresh and become facile with very old information. It also let me connect with locals in a way that just isn't possible otherwise.

When I was road tripping through Missouri earlier this year, I saw a hand-painted sign near the Mississippi river that read "It is called a flood plain because it is a plain that floods." This sign was apparently painted in response to some people nearby who were complaining aboout FEMA not bailing them out after they built their store outside the town's levee and then suffered catastrophic losses when the river flooded.

We heard some other tourists complain that it was raining during their rainforest hike. Umm.... it's called a rainforest because it's a forest that rains. They get four meters of rain per year, in fact.

I could have filmed a million-dollar viral Coke commercial for YouTube with my handheld camera. At the Curu reserve there was a domesticated monkey that liked to cuddle up with people and displayed lots of human habits such as drinking from a cup. At one point the monkey fished a half-empty Coca-Cola out of the trash and started drinking it. As a nearby girl tried to get the can of Coke back, the monkey danced backwards, staying out of reach. His tail was comically wrapped around a banana. As he took occasional sips from the can, his face displayed an easily anthropomorphizable "oh no you don't" expression. The whole thing was totally hilarious, but my camera was hidden away.

This moment, however, was well-documented. Dogs will beg from whoever appears to be in command of the food supply.

The monkey's extensive use of tools was very impressive given its small brain size. Given how few other animals, including ones with larger brains, have extensive tool use, it seems that some of the foundations of human intelligence may be a matter of improved software, not just brain size.

I'm not a botanist but I find the jungle fascinating. The jungle seems to be the Manhattan of the plant world – abundant resources in the form of rain and sunlight have led to the creation of an ecosystem that's among the densest on Earth. Plants are growing on top of other plants and squeezed into every conceivable place. Plants and animals develop highly specialized strategies to exploit some very specific niche such as growing on sand, growing in salt water, or nourishing a colony of ants that defend the plant from predators. The biodiversity is also visibly much higher than it is in more temperate ecosystems. The extent of this dense growth, variety, and specialization reminds me of what I see in very urban areas around the world. It makes walking around in nature a lot more interesting, as there is just so much ingenuity on display.

I can see the jungle as a brutally competitive place in which every individual of every species, plant or animal, is using whatever means necessary to claw its way to the top, pushing aside, devouring, poisoning, or strangling all others that stand in its way. Or, I can see it as an ingenious and highly optimized system for extracting as much performance as possible from the available resources. It's really both, and the side I see depends on my mood.

Unfortunately, aside from insects, there wasn't much wildlife on display. We tended to spot exotic birds, reptiles, and mammals in more open areas such as parking lots and public parks. I saw more tropical birds in 5 minutes at Telegraph Hill in San Francisco than I did in my entire week in Costa Rica.

Some evocative pictures:

( Lots more pictures )

The rainforest (and everywhere else, including the floors of very nice hotels) in Costa Rica was crawling with insects. They were of a size and range of variety that you just don't get in my part of the US. Here's some sense for what I saw:

(For scale, the insects shown below were all at least four inches long)

( more pics... )

We also went to an insect exhibit called "Jewels of the rainforest". Despite being widely lauded as one of the most impressive sights in the Monteverde area, we were the only two people on the tour for the exhibit. There was a giant crowd of churchgoing elderly folk that we thought were on the tour with us, but it turned out they were waiting for the butterfly exhibit.

The creator of this exhibit is a lifetime collector of insects, and he has the world's largest collection.

How to catch insects the lazy way.

Lonely Planet advises you against lots of things.

- Don't rent a motorcycle. Check. Did it in Vietnam. Was amazing.
- Don't eat from 3rd world street vendors. Check. That's where I got some of my best meals around the world.
- Don't hitch-hike. Finally got to check that one off.

We caught a ride on the back of a truck from the Curu reserve to Paquera. We ducked as the truck passed under various tree branches. It was a simple but rather intense video game. As we went along, we picked up various fieldworkers. Each of them had a large machete, which they tossed in the truck before climbing in. By the end, we were surrounded by men with machetes. What could possibly go wrong? Lots of things, of course. But nothing did.

It was challenging to get much of a sense of Costa Rica in only seven days. Looking at the map, we only visited a tiny triangle of locations in a grand swath of country. However, we made sure to try to have a variety of experiences. As I talked about in Sociocultural Bingo a while back, it's fun to make sure to hit a mix of rich and poor, touristy and not-touristy, and urban and rural.

The first part of the trip was fairly pre-planned and involved staying at a nice resort near the Arenal volcano. The resort was home to some beautifully constructed (and shockingly expensive) hot springs. Ironiccally, it was cheaper to stay at the hotel for a night and get free access to the hot springs than it was to get two tickets to enter the hot springs.

I had never stayed in a five-star resort before. The service perks were impressive. For example, my traveling companion Laura forgot her contact lenses, and the hotel staff quickly got her perscription, bought some, and brought them to her. Room service was presented beautifully even though it was just a pile of $6 nachos. Overall it was interesting though I wasn't used to the experience of being so thoroughly waited on. And we got to do it all for the price of a low-end business hotel in the US.

We spent most of our days running around between various ecotourism adventures. We kept day-to-day activities flexible in order to accommodate the changing weather, but we managed to do some stunning things, most notably a very safety-third cave tour that involved (among other things) belly-surfing on an underground river with the ceiling just a foot above our heads. Other activities included a treetop walk through the rainforest and a hike near an active volcano.

From the cave: (full set on flickr)

Hiking near the active volcano Arenal:

( more... )

There was this one tree in the rainforest in Costa Rica that bore a rather strong resemblance to part of the male anatomy (but in a really unhealthy sort of way)

I think the "cocks" are the beginnings of new roots.

I debated putting the pictures behind a cut for all you sensitive readers out there, but you know, it's just a tree. Well, it's a tree and your malfunctioning neural object-recognition system.

Tabacon was the ridiculously nice (and expensive) hot springs we checked out in Costa Rica. It's supposed to be beautiful, but we were so busy during the day that we only got around to seeing it at night. It was lit dramatically, and the steam rising from the springs sliced the spotlights into beautiful rays and gave the thin foliage a translucent glow.