Living in Costa Rica retirement relocation tours.

Why I live in Costa Rica or Why Smaller is Better

The first week of December I visited my home town of Thousand Oaks, California. I had not returned in almost seven years. The first thing I noticed was that a lot had changed dramatically. Due to a construction boom, I could barely recognize some of the areas of town. It seemed like everything had become a great deal more commercial and homogeneous on much larger scale. Everywhere I went there were people driving a whole gamut of Sports Utility Vehicles or as they are more commonly known, SUVS. The streets were filled with gas-guzzling vehicles we rarely see in Costa Rica - the Ford Excursion, the GMC Yukon, the Ford F-250 monster truck and a couple of models of Hummers – to name a few. The latter is similar to military vehicle you see in Iraq which is being blown to pieces by roadside bombs. The version sold in the states is more luxurious with its leather seats, colorful paint and sporty trim. In California it appears that the bigger the vehicle, the better it is and more status a person has. You are defined by what you drive I guess the car’s size reflects the owner’s ego. The interesting thing is that very few of the owners use these mammoth vehicles to go off road but only for commuting at a snail’s pace on the over crowded freeways, for going to the grocery store and to take the kids to soccer practice.

The freeways are also bigger than ever. They usually have four or five lanes in each direction. Rush hour is almost an all day affair. Traffic begins to get bad at 5:30 in the morning and ends around 8:00 at night. Sprawling, massive, slow-moving traffic jams can extend from Ventura Country in the north to the Mexican border just south of San Diego. These are normal conditions. God forbid if there is an accident! The freeways are indeed bigger but not a faster means of transportation than our pot-hole-filled roads in Costa Rica. Costa Rica’s presas or traffic jams are small in comparison.

Everything else is super sized up north. There are 24-hour enormous gyms to keep those perfect bodies in shape. Almost every major shopping center and strip mall has a Starbucks, a Subway sandwich shop, a Home Depot, a Wallmart, a Target, a big chain vitamin store, a Borders or Barnes & Noble bookstore, a branch of Best Buy and almost every other colossal chain store. There are supermarkets that even dwarf our Hipermás. They have a huge selection of every imaginable food. There are the gigantic bags of potato chips, barrrel-sized bottles of soda pop, and a variety of mouth-watering delicacies to stimulate your appetite. No wonder obesity is such a monumental problem in the U.S. Restaurants super sizes everything. There is even a chain of pet stores called Pet Co. Most of their stores are as big or larger than a Costa Rican supermarket. I guess most pets are also overweight in the States. It would not surprise me if there is a Weight Watchers for pets.

Then there are the massive Kinkos copy centers. They basically offer every conceivable type of service from making photo copies to using the Internet. Everything is under one roof and they are conveniently opened 24-hours. These stores are extremely handy for the traveling business person. I accessed my e-mail everyday by using one of their computers. I was going to use the local public library’s computer services at $5 an hour but there was an hour limits. The price at Kinkos proved to be astronomical. I paid $12 per hour to use a state of the art credit card device connected directly to the computer. The cost of the average net café in Costa Rica is about a dollar an hour. However, none of the Internet cafés in Costa Rica that I have seen feature new Dell computers like the ones at Kinkos.

Everything else is geared towards large scale consumption. People seem very happy and caught up in their fast-paced lifestyles of expensive SUVS, the “shop until you drop” mentality and living in their palatial upscale housing tracts which seem like ritzy suburban ghettos where every house looking almost exactly like it had been cut from the same mold.

After a few days of experiencing everything on the large scale, I began to yearn for my simple down-sized lifestyle in petite Costa Rica. People here seem to be a lot happier with much less. The average person here is materially poorer than the average American, but their lives are far more richer. Here people seem to live with gusto (enjoyment) and sabor ( a flavor or spice). In Costa Rica every day can be filled with adventure and exciting activities. Sure we have the malls and a dose of U.S. culture but we also have a lot more little things which truly make life immensely more worthwhile. People up north exist, we live the pure life on a much smaller scale. The phrase, “¡Pura vida!,” says it all.