Hard to believe it´s already March. It seems like the last month has flown by, and it was definately a great one, spent on La Iguana chocolate farm in the mountains of western Costa Rica. My last few days there were pretty darn eventful, and I found myself appreciating more than ever the magnificient rolling mountains that we would walk through to get to the river for a swim, or to town for a drink or the internet. The simplicity of life there was beautiful, and I´ve never in my life enjoyed reading more. On my last day I went in to town were they were in the final preperations for the big dance party that would be happening the following night. There I got to witness the process of making Tamales, and did my part in washing off the banana leaves they would use to wrap the Tamales in. I took careful notes on the process, and the women were more than happy to help out a gringo who was strangely curious in learning how to cook. After returning home for lunch, I quickly hurried back to town, because I heard that there would be a slaughtering of a pig around 2 o´clock.
I had never seen an animal be slaughtered before, and when the pick up truck pulled up to the Salon Comunal (where the Tamale process was still going on) I approached it with great curiousity. This curiousity turned to horror as I heard the bloodcurdling screams of the big as it was yanked off the back of the truck. This thing was humongous, they said 200 kilos but I would have argued more, and put up a hell of a fight as the big dude in town, Mauricio, yanked it by a long rope attached to a kind of harness, down the hill to the side of the Salon, where a fire had been going for a while. I can´t possibly express the awfulness of this pigs screams as it put up his last fight; I am completely certain that he knew exactly what awaited him at the bottom of the hill. Once they got him to the spot where they wanted him, they took off the harness and he laid down on his belly, as if accepting his fate. Two other guys came out, one holding an axe about as tall as I am, and another with a foot long knife (and a breathtaking curly haired mullet). After a moment of discussion, the man with the axe raised it high into the sky, and brought the blunt end down on the pig´s head with a loud thud. The next moment, mullet man plunged his knife into the stunned pig´s chest, which started spouting blood instantly. The pig bled and gargled for a minute or two, before his whole body went into violent shaking, bleeding the whole time, and then that was it. The whole time all I wanted to do was turn away, but because I eat animals who are killed much more brutally than that, who live their lives in much worse conditions than this pig did, I felt like I owed it to all those animals I´ve eaten to watch this bloodbath.
After the pig was dead, they put him on some wooden slats and poured boiling water on him as they took the hair off his body with the same long knife. This was particularly strange to watch because a pig´s skin looks so much like that of a rather pale human. It was like watching Tom Hennessey be shaved with a long knife. Bleh.

Anyway, I am now sitting on a bus leaving Dominical, where I have spent the last few days hanging and body surfing with Jimmy and his friend from Peabody who is visiting for the week. As I look out the windows of the bus I am struck by the fact that most all of the signs written on the side of the road are in english. Everything seems to be ¨For Sale¨ or ¨For Rent¨, but never ¨Se Vende¨ or ¨Se Alquila¨. There are no secrets about where all of this land is going, about in whose hands, or in what color hands, it is being concentrated. This makes me suddenly aware of the other thing I have found at the edge of most every road I have walked or traveled in Costa Rica, no matter how remote: fences. Sometimes there will be a steep hillside instead or the fence will be overgrown with plants or vines to make it look nicer, but every piece of land has a barrier blocking it off from the outside. Even if it is just a wasteland, with nothing at all there but trash, it will still be sectioned off so no one would encroach on it. When all of this buying and selling of Costa Rican land started (or ¨land development¨), fueled primarily by foreign capital, there must have been an explosion in staking claim to land by building fences. I wonder what kind of shifts in attitude this brought on. Attitudes towards neighbors in fighting over land, towards the land itself, as being seen as a commodity instead of a vulnerable pìece of the earth to protect and nurture, or towards foreigners, as either an opportunity for capital or a target of resentment for taking native land.
In this face of overwhelming gringo inflow, it seems interesting to note that all the gringos want is to avoid each other. It seems that all of the tourists complain about how much they hate ¨tourists¨, as if they´re just the ugliest thing in the world. The most coveted locations are the most ¨untouched¨, or ¨natural¨- which seems to be suggest simply being uncontaminated by gringo touch. After all, Costa Ricans, seem to be just about the moth coveted commodity around besides their land. Everyone wants to experience the ¨culture¨, or have a connection with a ¨local¨. It kind of cracks me up to see these desires so strongly held by largely the same people by who are in many ways destroying the very culture they so fetishize, to covet a connection with the same locals whose land they are in facting buying up and poisoning.
Dominical was definately a shock to the system after living in the mountains for the past month. I was there for three days, and that was enough. It was such a cluster of people, a completely American village, where english was easier to be found than spanish. In this aspect I was also pretty turned off, guilty of the same aversion to mass quantities of other whites that I find so interesting to observe. Although I think I disliked Dominical more because there were just so many people on top of each other, there were plenty of whities in the mountains who I really enjoyed, the difference was more that of there being plenty of space, and solitude, as well. Anyway, I wonder where this gringo aversion among gringos stems from. It makes me think that it may stem from some subconscious rejection of our own gringo culture, which in turn fuels this intense fetishism of ¨local culture¨. In the attempt to escape all things gringo in our travels (which seem to be the most desireable times, the times everyone works so hard for) are we somehow acknowledging the harmfulness of the lifestyles that American culture has come to foster? Even in spite of the proud to be an American songs, and of all of the other forms of patriotist propoganda we are constantly indoctrinated with, is there some sort of subconscious rejection, among some Americans, of American culture, that I am seeing portrayed here in Costa Rica?