Mission: Urban

A few weeks after we moved here, I remember feeling very frustrated one night with the food we were eating (which wasn’t anything that Jil had made, by the way). It wasn’t that the food was really bad or anything, it was just that it was different. And even though I’d even tried the same dish before, it seemed like it tasted just a little bit different each time that I ate it. I remember feeling frustrated and thinking, it doesn’t even really matter to me what the food tastes like exactly, I just want to sit down to eat, and have a reasonable expectation BEFOREHAND of what the food is going to taste like. I don’t want eating to be a stressful thing right now. I was honestly pretty shocked that I was feeling all of this. Normally, I really enjoy trying new foods, new recipes, etc. But at this point, I’d had my fill of “new” and was ready for something “familiar”. Before we came, we were very well-prepared to experience this type of thing, you know the whole culture shock stuff that everybody goes through, apparently even regardless of how much you’ve been taught on it and counseled regarding it beforehand. So equally frustrating to me on this night, was the fact that I was feeling this way, and we’d only been living here like 3 weeks or something. Was it just going to keep getting worse?!!!!!

Well, today after class, I was enjoying what has become one of my personal favorite snacks (my wife might even say an addiction) - platanos. Just about every day I will eat a bag of either platanos maduros (with a great salty/sweet combo) or platanos verdes with a chile/lemon kick. Both are amazingly delicious to me … now. And sitting today enjoying a bag, I was reminded of this night not too long ago when I honestly felt like I would never enjoy a single morsel of Costa Rican food.  Now, I can’t imagine what it will be like when we now longer live in Costa Rica, and I’m not able to eat these every day.