Costa Rica the Old “Gringos” Reality: Guide Book to Living Real Life in La-La Land ...

By Jon Stegenga

The Old Gringos Who Contributed To This Gude Book
Have A Combined 90 Plus Years Of Living Real Life At The Neighbourhood Level, Mostly In Small Towns In Costa Rica

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491855959

Jon Stegenga

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2014 Jon Stegenga. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/12/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5595-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

DISCLAIMER

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

SECURITY

POLICE

BANKING AND INVESTING

LAWYERS AND IMMIGRATION

HOUSE CONSTRUCTION

AUTO MECHANICS

LAND DEALS

DOCTORS AND DENTISTS

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

GENERAL TICO HASSLE

KING FOR A DAY

AFTERWORD

DEDICATION

I forget the name of the film that gave me the line… .

I’ve had enough and I’m not going to take anymore. This book is dedicated to every crooked cop in Costa

Rica who’s pulled me over for no other reason than I’m a white-haired old gringo driving alone, and fleeced me for a bribe.

This book is also dedicated to all those Costa Rican lawyers who over the years bilked me and virtually every foreigner I’ve known here out of thousands and thousands of dollars, and whom I refer to as a criminal class.

DISCLAIMER

Dear Reader,

Please do my children and grandchildren a favor.

As you read my guide for living life in Costa Rica, please remember: every sentence that you think would be punishable by a prison sentence should be considered as just the mental wandering of a senile old man.

If you don’t, my lawyer feels that in the future both my children and my grandchildren will have to visit me in a dreadful Costa Rican prison.

Example: Can it possibly be true that anyone has ever paid off crooked cops in Latin America?>

That thought is simply outlandish. Right? Agreed?

Thanks,

Jon Stegenga

FOREWORD

The last ticket I received from the last crooked cop I experienced here in Costa Rica caused me to begin writing what you are about to read. If I had known how difficult it was going to be I wouldn’t have begun. I would have just turned that ticket over to my lawyer who claimed to be able to fix any ticket.

What can one lone older man living in a wee small house on a peaceful green hillside hope to accomplish by picking up a pen and quietly saying, I’ve had enough? When I started writing I thought I’d finally get some stories down on paper by interviewing some fellow Old Gringos. Little did I know that before finishing I’d end up using over fifty felt pens! And why so many?

I discovered quickly that it’s extremely difficult to write the truth about the underbelly of Costa Rica when dozens of existing guidebooks paint such a wonderful, peaceful, serene, benevolent picture of what those writers refer to as paradise. So a lot of felt pens got thrown through my house and went splat on my nice white walls after I’d torn up what I’d just finished writing because it sounded bitter or angry and not just frustrating. And a lot of valuable felt-pen ink was wasted toning down notes from discussions with my group of old gringos.

When I had finished the fourth complete rewrite, transforming my manuscript from R-rated to passable and even a little bit humorous, I must admit I was sick and disgusted with it and with myself and tossed it into a lower desk drawer where it remained for six months, untouched and mostly out of mind, while I refreshed myself in my flower gardens. Than one day I had to face myself and ask, Okay, big dummy, what are you going to do with it?

It was at that point I decided to have more copies of the manuscript made and test it out on friends and acquaintances. There were many people who knew I was putting together what they’d heard was an Old Gringo guidebook and they had been pestering me for months for a quick read. So I had readings on my patio on Sunday afternoons and invited the first group of six older North Americans. When they had settled in I gave each of them a copy of my manuscript. The deal was they got one hour to read whatever they liked, then I’d pick up the manuscripts and then I got an hour to discuss their feelings on what they’d read.

After I picked up the manuscripts on that first Sunday session and served coffee and expensive pastries, I realized everyone at my table was a bit uneasy, glancing around, fidgeting, sort of wishing they could be elsewhere. After a difficult minute or two I decided to clear the air by saying, I think we can all agree what you’ve just spent an hour reading is basically trash.

That cut the ice; everyone laughed, some more than others, and their facial expressions and body language informed me of what I already knew regarding my manuscript. When the (laughter) calmed down I asked my first question: So we agree my manuscript is trash but I ask you: What kind of trash is it?

I’ll never forget the first person who responded to that question. Before I’d finished the question a casual acquaintance sat up, smiled broadly, and said, Oh Jon, it’s trash all right, but oh boy, it’s interesting trash.

And then the buzzing chatter around my table took on a life of its own that lasted several hours. Everyone that first Sunday session, and at each Sunday session thereafter, agreed my underbelly guide for Costa Rica was trash, but also full of valuable information. The two dozen people who attended my Sunday sessions mostly agreed that most American newspapers were also basically trash, along with magazines like People and US and the hundreds of other glittery, crappy magazines that cover whole walls in some North American bookstores.

After four consecutive Sunday afternoon sessions on my patio, with everyone encouraging me to persevere and transform my manuscript into a book, I said I would, based on the answer to that first question as to what sort of trash my manuscript represented.

Oh Jon, it’s trash all right, but oh boy, it’s interesting trash.

JON STEGENGA

Ciudad Colon

Costa Rica

INTRODUCTION

The First Lonely Planet guidebook came out in the early 1970s. It had a yellow cover was thin and covered Thailand. After thirty-five years the world is covered by hundreds of guidebooks in dozens of languages. Today it’s possible to follow a small half-page map down twisting alleyways through a maze of shops and emerge at the humble door of the cheapest room in Casablanca, Kathmandu or Calcutta. What all the present guidebooks assume is that the user of the guide is just passing through. When they have experienced the place they will head for a border or an airport and leave the guidebook behind in a used-book store

I was on the road before guidebooks were a must-have, and over the past thirty-five years I have encountered hundreds of expats who didn’t leave. Mostly these men and women fell in love and decided that, with her or with him, they’d found what they had been searching for; so they stopped their journeys and started new lives with new partnersoften developing rustic accommodations on faraway beaches. It was from these expats that I always learned what I referred to as the real truths about a place, not just a description.

At the same time I have always thanked the creators of the guidebooks that have assisted me in my travels through 125plus countries over the past 35 years. But I think I’ve always known that the standard guide format to find the cheapest rooms, best street food, and important cultural events was not set up as a guide on how to live a life or what to expect in whatever country I was passing through.

Today there are literally millions of expats living in virtually every corner of the world. Over the past thirty years I’ve discussed with many expats in various countries the need for the type of guidebook you are presently reading. Our conversations would always come round to, Isn’t it time for a new level of guidebook that doesn’t describe where the cheap rooms and best street food are located? One based on living in a country versus one designed to be used while passing through?

This reality guidebook does not give the directions to any rooms, cheap or expensive, nor does it recommend any food or must-see cultural events. For those kinds of directions for Costa Rica there are at least thirty existing guidebooks. The Old Gringos’ Reality Guidebook For Living Life In Costa Rica concentrates on the experiences of many old gringos who have a combined ninety years of living here: the knowledge of thousands of both natives (called "Ticos’) and foreign residents, and investigative snooping with an emphasis on literally tens of thousands of days of living real life in Costa Rica as foreign residents.

This guidebook isn’t for the citizens of Costa Rica; it’s for foreigners both tourists and future residentsto have a better understanding of what they can expect and roughly how they might be treated.

Of the contributors, who I affectionately refer to as the old gringos, I am the only one to follow through and get what you’re reading down on paper. Creating a literary masterpiece was the last thing on my mind when years ago one of my friends first asked, Steg, why isn’t that down on paper?

The contributors to this book all migrated south to Costa Rica years ago primarily to avoid winters in places like North Dakota, upstate New York, and the rainy Pacific northwest. We probably would have found our warmth and worked on our contentment in the Florida Keys if we could have gotten to them back in 1950s. We were not only looking for warmth but were in desperate need of a life style that radiated humanness… a place lacking in condos, track homes, gated communities, malls, fast-food franchises, the Interstate… a place with villages and narrow asphalt roads where we could live lives closer to nature. When most of us arrived in Costa Rica in the 1980s, we agreed we had stumbled into a tropical place that still made human sense.

1985! As recently as 1985 Costa Rica was a laid-back slowed-down, tropical almost-paradise. Living standards were fairly high, yet costs were a third those in the States. In those years, before the deluge of tourists, our major complaint was trying to find Skippy peanut butter and One-a-Day vitamins. Those were the good old daysdon’t laugh, even Ticos agree that 1985 was the last of the old related friendly Costa Rica. In those days the government actually wanted North American residents. They encouraged us to relocate, even giving us incentives like importing one tax-free car every five years along with our residency.

Those days are long gone! The government and people of Costa Rica no longer welcome foreigners with open arms. Xenophobic feelings are strong enough for government ministers to recognize them in newspaper articles, supermarket prices are as high or higher than in the States, gasoline prices approach those in Europe, construction materials are sky-high, crime is completely out of control, and the old friendly Tico outlook and lifestyle has been replaced by one strictly based on the lunge for the almighty dollar. The old, slower pace of life has been replaced by one which, if I were to use just two words from up North to describe it, would be road rage. The most important loss suffered by all Ticos since the explosion in tourism, which has required Ticos to service the monster’s needs, has been plain old-fashioned time.

Before, meaning in the good old days, pre-1985, when the reputation of both Costa Rica and her people were established everyone had loads of time for long lunches and even longer siestas. Several leisurely family vacations each year were usually spent camping in tents on a beach, often arriving at by bus. Now every fast-food franchise from the States is located in the food courts in the many malls that surround San Jose, and Tico families are gulping down burgers while their ever-fatter children hungrily devour containers of French fries large enough for the entire family. Business has replaced the afternoon siesta, and today for vacations Tico families pile into father’s block-long, ten-thousand horsepower, larger-than-life SUV and frantically race around Costa Rica, staying in rented bungalows.

There are places in the upper valley around San Jose where in 1985 a person could have placed a lawn chair in the center of a road that passes through open farm fields, and on a busy Saturday morning maybe twenty cars would pass each hour. Today on any Saturday that same road, which isn’t any wider, is bumper-to-bumper with new SUVs, their tinted windows rolled up and air conditioners running full-blast trying to cool off men who are on the verge of road rage. And those once pristine open fields are full of every conceivable North American franchise outlet with their required asphalt parking lots. And along with the bumper-to-bumper traffic there’s bumper-to-bumper congestion in every parking lot in front of every muffler shop, sub-sandwich parlor, car dealership, car wash, burger joint, and pizza parlorwith even parking-lot rage!

Recently, this old gringo made the unforgivable mistake of walking past an open parking space in a mall parking lot just as a middle-aged Tica (Costa Rican woman) came zooming up in her $150,000 Hummer. As she tried to wipe into the parking place she became exasperated that this old gringo didn’t jump out of her way, and was forced to use her brakes, pausing for at most two or three seconds, God forbid, while I passed her parking spot. As I walked in front of her Hummer we made eye contact and her annoyed expression was enough to let me know I was not welcome. When I had barely passed, she gunned her monster and it lunged into her space. I was tempted to ask her if she was out in her Hummer on this beautiful morning to pick up her family’s daily bread… a Hummer! I didn’t, I just put on my best pre-1985 smile and just made a mental note of the scene for the future.

There are parallels between Costa Rica and Thailand, where

I try to spend several months each year, in how they deal with their tourists and their foreign residents. In the last thirty years tourism in Thailand has roller-coastered along with the ups and downs of the world economy. When the economies of the west caught a cold, Thai tourism immediately went on a respirator, as it did during the Asian Tiger economic crisis of 1997. When the Thai economy is down the Thai government bends over backwards to accommodate foreigners… whether they are tourists or resident expats. To increase tourism the Thai government advertises throughout North America and Europe, promoting things like The Year of Thai, where tourists can request longer visas at airports, costs are down, and Thais are told to smile at the foreigners.

Now that Thailand is fully developed and has a strong economy, the government of Thailand has exposed its xenophobia towards foreign residents. Recently the financial requirement for residency in Thailand was increased from roughly $7,000 per year to exactly $25,000, which has forced thousand of expats, some with Thai families, to leave the country. The present government of Thailand is led by a party whose name in English is… Thai for Thai!

The Costa Rican government and people once genuinely wanted and welcomed foreigners, who if the history of Costa Rica were to be written have made significant contributions to her now powerful economy. Now that the economy of Costa Rica is robust, the question on the sidewalks is… why are all the foreigners in Costa Rica?

Whenever I am confronted with xenophobic questions here, I’m very vocal about the 250,000 citizens of Costa Rica who live and educate their children in the United States, both legally and illegally. I also state plainly and oftentimes sharply that xenophobia is not a human outlook that the average Tico living in the States will ever experience. As I’ve watched Costa Rica change I’m coming to think there might be a new political party forming somewhere in Costa Rica called Tico For Tico.

As for us gringos who have been discussing the contents of this book for years, I can assure the reader we are not happy about the picture of life we are responsible for. One question that nags us is whether what’s in this book is a fair representation of Costa Rica at the national level. None of us old gringos are sure, but we think it is. What we are sure of is that this book is a fair representation of life in Costa Rica at what we call the neighborhood level, because that’s where we all live. This book condenses knowing thousands of Ticos over decades, and we all realize that our conclusions are bleak.

Now, will this book be accepted by all foreign residents as a true portrait of life in Costa Rica for its expats? Of course not. It would be impossible to write a book of this size about life in Chicago, Norway or Timbuktu that would be accepted by all the foreign residents in those places. Still, us old gringos feel reasonably certain that if the 100,000 foreign residents from first-world countries who live in Costa Rica read this book, most of them would agree more than disagree with what we say. And why would they? Because most everything in this book has been well discussed for years by both citizens and foreign residentsgranted, mostly behind closed doors. Example: the section on police and how we old gringos discuss paying off the crooked cops of Costa Rica. Even Ticos will admit to that hassle… behind closed doors.

There are foreign residents in Costa Rica who live in gated communities surrounding a golf course, complete with all the sporting amenities of an Olympic village. Many of them never leave their gates; they speak no Spanish and insist their maids and gardeners speak passable English, and if they don’t the rich send them to English school. As one rich old foreign woman who’s lived in Costa Rica for decades said to me, My maid is spending her mornings in school studying English because she has to speak better, I hate speaking with her as if she were an idiot. I was tempted to ask her if she had read The Ugly American. These types of foreign residents in Costa Rica won’t be able to identify with anything in this book. Their chauffeurs do the bribing!

There will be foreign residents here who, after reading this book, will both wish they had had the opportunity to contribute their two cents’ worth and definitely agree more than disagree, and even wish we had been more open in our assessment of the… . New . . . . Costa Rica, if that’s possible.

All of us old gringos know many ex-foreign residents who once lived happily in Costa Rica who have voted for the contents of this book with their feet, by relocating to places like Panama, Nicaragua and Ecuador primarily because they think Costa Rica sold out years ago (1985?)in pursuit of the American dream. They could no longer stomach life amongst egotistical xenophobic Ticos who live frantic lives based on materialism, greed, and corruption, and whose first thought is chasing the almighty dollar.

We old gringos could have created, if we had wanted to, a guidebook to living life in Costa Rica that would have appealed to all the older American tourists who are flooding into Costa Rica. The shelves in the tourist sections of every bookstore are full of gorgeous coffee-table tomes. A few of us old gringos could have posed on the cover wearing our favorite Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts with our best smiles. That sort of book would have been easy. We could have plagiarized bits and pieces and fun stories from the dozens of existing guidebooks, which were created by plagiarizing from others. If we had created such a book we would have accomplished nothing, satisfied no one, wasted a lot of valuable trees and ultimately put everyone who read it to sleep. After you, the reader, have finished reading The Old Gringos’ Reality Guide to Living Life in Costa Rica it will be obvious we have created a different type of guidebook that is definitely not picturesque.

Please remember, this book is not a polished, slick guidebook put together by brilliant literary types. It was compiled by a bunch of nice (sharp) older American men with the sole intention of making the reader aware there are definitely aspects of life in Costa Rica that aren’t covered by the dozens of existing guidebooks to La-La land.

Is this supposed to replace existing guidebooks for Costa Rica? No; when I’m wandering the world I often buy several guidebooks to the country I’m visiting, with the idea that if just one paragraph in a guidebook leads me off to a beautiful awakening experience, then the entire book was worth both its cost and the hassle in carrying it.

The collective hope of us old gringos is that our rather different guidebook will help you have a more successful and a safer visit or life here in Tico land. As I write these sentences I have before me a letter I cut out of an English-language newspaper here, addressed to the editor, written by Ms. Regina Rosa, entitled Beware of the baby vomit scam. In Ms. Rosa’s opinion, what happened to her and her man was a new scam. The scam they experienced is not new. We old gringos discuss the mayonnaise catsup-and-mustard mix on the shoulder bird shit scam in some detail. Considering the cost of a laptop computer, I’m sure Ms. Rosa wishes she had read our book!

Some readers might ask, would this book be different if it had been put together by a group of twenty-, thirty-, or forty-something men or women? Of course it would, but that question is a bit irrelevant in that the ages of this book’s creators has no bearing on the basic facts presented. Namely: the police of Costa Rica are third-world and mostly corrupt, the date-rape drug is a serious social problem, thievery is a way of life here, banking and investing can be scary, seven out of ten lawyers are criminals in their dealings with foreigners, and crime pays.

Now, if this book had been created by people in their twenties, thirties or forties, would they be able to justify incest or whitewash the date-rape drug or explain away the nervous breakdown the tropical-fruit-tree lady experienced? Or would they have gotten a fair bill from the mechanic who charged $860 to check over a car prior to having it inspected? And lastly, on the age of this book’s creators: the many different people who fell for the scam of buying a cheap beach lot in Santa Teresa were all in their twenties, thirties, and forties!

When I decided to get off the road and settle in Costa Rica I purchased ten guidebooks covering beaches, parks and cities. Were they all beneficial? No, because they were all much the same; maybe a sentence or two in each helped me find my place. Do I still have them? No I passed them all on to travelers passing through from Australia (she was wonderful), Japan, Germany, and the States, because now I spend almost all my time tending my gardens, both inner and outer.

The aim by all the old gringos can be summed up in one sentence spoken by one of us months ago, and which we hope we have now answered: As an older guy, I wish I’d known everything we’ve been discussing about Costa Rica before I arrived.

As the man responsible for compiling this book