City Centers

My first company Arup has an internal company directory. It's basically Arup Facebook where employees share their headshot, professional qualifications, expertise, project experience, as well as personal interests. One field "Proudest Achievement" could be either, and revealed a lot about one's personality. Years later, I still remember my friend's achievement: "High fiving Michael Jordan."

You can search for coworkers by name, or by office. Sitting in the company's largest office, I was often intrigued by the smaller offices around the world, in faraway places. There's an office in Mauritius that had probably 40 people. Mauritius, the island nation off the coast of East Africa with British and French colonial history and possibly the world's most diverse populace. I browsed through the office employee names and saw someone whose name looked a lot like mine. It could have been Christopher Lim or Calvin Liu or Kevin Lee or something. He was definitely Chinese but Mauritian, a Graduate Engineer who had graduated university in the UK. He was a Manchester United and F1 fan. As I stalked read his profile, I couldn't help but feel an incredible sense of connection - I felt from his interests that we had similar personalities, perhaps even similar life experiences despite our wildly different places of birth. I wondered, would I be him if my parents had chosen to move to Mauritius instead of the United States? It suddenly seemed less preposterous a hypothetical. What would that have been like? Here I could see one manifestation of that alternate universe, as a skinny engineer who grew up watching David Beckham, speaking English, French and Chinese (maybe Hakka?), playing Starcraft, and now working at the exact same company as me.

Publicly available photo of Arup Mauritius office

I grew up believing the United States to be the center of the world. I wondered how anyone else could interpret the world any other way. With its geopolitical might and the immigrant melting pot legacy, American exceptionalism is core to our upbringing. Even our immigrant tale is inextricably spun with a sense of superiority, about people finding a better life in this better country. Somehow I was educated with the misbelief that the US was the only country with substantial immigration - in my mind, the other countries were monocultures with little desire or ability to accept immigrants.

I'm not sure when I discarded this myth, but by the time I was working in Hong Kong, my peer group included overseas Chinese from Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Malaysia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Panama, Indonesia, Tanzania and so on. Everyone was well-adjusted, well-educated and often substantially more interesting and multilingual than me.  When I discovered my Mauritian doppelgänger, I had completely detached American-ness with exceptionalism.

So this is actually a post about New York. I know, that was a long walk. But hear me out. My life in Asia re-centered my world. With over 4 billion people, the majority of humanity, living in Asia, how central could America possibly be? Asia and its billions had rewired my ambitions, dreams and definitions of "cool" or "success." 

When I moved back to Boston, I found myself walking past buildings downtown, including the high rise on State Street where my mom worked. As I watched suits dashing by, I couldn't help but think how provincial it all felt. I imagined these people trying to climb the corporate ladder at these downtown offices to get club seats at Fenway Park and a seat at a gala hosted at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It was jarring to realize that I used to want that life.

And then I moved to New York. Having grown up in Boston and gone to college in DC, New York had always loomed large. For so many in my peer group, New York City was their dream. Many of my friends didn't even consider jobs in other cities post-college - many probably didn't even wonder if they'd enjoy living here, they just figured it was the path they should take. Landing a job and moving to New York represented success. But for me now, it just represents this concrete mass with a decrepit subway system and an obsolete class system where a lot of high paying US jobs happen to be based. The city's self-centeredness clashes with my rewired sensibilities, and my peers reeked of default choices.

My mentality in NYC was edgy.  When asked how I was enjoying the city, I wanted to summarize the previous 8 paragraphs. Instead I'd deliver some snippy response meant to establish my cosmopolitan credentials, point out my barbs against the city while minimizing offense at the questioners' invariable New York pride. I was so preoccupied with distinguishing my attitude that I struggled to enjoy the city as it was. I took in the skyscrapers and the street food and those flimsy metro cards as someone else's ideal city, and told myself I was just here for a job. 

*****

I'm not sure exactly when I wrote that. I'm picking this up in a different city, a full two years later. The last few paragraphs don't entirely jibe with how I feel about New York, or how I remember my experience there. I was only 8 months in when Covid-19 shut the city down and my East Village apartment suddenly felt very small. I ended up moving out in the beginning of May, and though I thought I'd be returning, I didn't. 

At some point it became clear that I'd need to start over somewhere, and it wasn't going to be in Asia. At that point, moving back to New York didn't feel like moving back - it felt like starting over. Considering I never fully felt like I vibed there, I instead sought out a place where I did feel some connection. Seattle ended up being the only choice.

Unlike New York, Seattle has no pretenses about being the center of the world. Similar to Boston, it is a small city tucked away in a corner of the country but makes up for the lack of size and geographic centrality with outsized economic and cultural impact

The Great Leap Forward

 Rarely does a story touch on as many issues personal to me as Eileen Gu's 2022 Winter Olympics run representing China. Olympics, China, America, international sports - it's a quadruple lutz of meaty topics. Her Winter Olympic performance across three events - Big Air, slopestyle, and half pipe, all on skis - netted her a gold, silver and gold and made her arguably the most memorable individual of the Games. The unique intrigue to the story however was her representing the host China, despite being born and raised in America. Her decision and citizenship status raised a lot of speculation and generated controversy in some minor subcultures of American society. 

Here are the facts - Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco to Yan Gu, a Chinese winter sports athlete who had moved to the US for Master's studies. Her father's identity is not public, but he is known to be a white American and to not have had a major role raising her. Eileen was born a US citizen and given the omniscient Chinese name of  爱凌 Ai Ling, meaning "Love Ice" but also sounding like Eileen. In some ways it seems her upbringing was very similar to that of an ABC (American-born Chinese), speaking Mandarin with her mom and maternal grandparents. However she spent a lot of summers in Beijing and it's pretty clear she has a closer grip to Chinese culture and Mandarin than the vast majority of ABCs.  In 2019 when she was 15, she decided to change her affiliation from the US and compete for China as a freestyle skier. 

Eileen has explained some of her reasons for changing, touting her close affiliation with China and her desire to inspire the Chinese youth to take up winter sports. Outsiders have speculated cynically that she did it for sponsorship reasons, soaking up the spotlight in the massive Chinese market in lieu of the crowded American one, or that Chinese propaganda had brainwashed her. The lowest rung of hateful American conservatives have branded her a traitor, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, and the "worst person in the world". Furthermore, as Chinese nationality laws prohibits dual nationalities for anyone over 18, questions have arisen over whether Gu has given up her American citizenship.

As is often the case with personal attacks, they reveal less about the victim and more about the insecurity of the attacker, in this case insecurity in America's global status. International sports have long struggled over rules designed to create firm team boundaries in a world full of fluid borders and identities. Examples abound of individuals representing countries other than their birth place for all sorts of reasons, to the extent that this Wikipedia page goes on and on.  Lots of people immigrate and choose to represent their naturalized country, like Somali-born distance runner Mo Farah who won gold medals for the United Kingdom. Others choose to represent the country of their parents, often because they are not good enough to represent their birth country, but sometimes because they want to support their heritage nation, like French ⚽ star Riyad Mahrez playing for Algeria.  Most international federations allow athletes some flexibility in choosing their sporting nationality.

As a nation of immigrants, USA sports have particularly benefitted from dual nationals, including athletes like Philip Dutton, Kaillie Humphries and Bernard Lagat who competed for the USA after having won Olympic medals for other nations. In many sports, the US revel in naturalized citizens. On the flip side, for the US men's ⚽ team, nearly half the stars are Europeans who happen to have a US passport for one reason or another. I suspect when the culturally French Jordan Pefok scores for the US in the World Cup, no one will complain about how he can't speak English. Meanwhile in sports where America excels, many athletes who miss the US cut often find their ways onto other countries' teams, such as WNBA star Becky Hammon playing for Russia. 

What America rarely sees is a homegrown superstar choosing to represent another nation. Even more notable is when that other nation is a geopolitical rival. America has long been the country where athletes can make the most money, garner the most fame and live the best life. For someone to choose China over America reveals a truth that's difficult for so many Americans to swallow - that China can compete with the US on market opportunities and perhaps even quality of life. The outrage over this sports story is fundamentally an outrage over America's changing place in the world.

Eileen Gu jumped into this firestorm when she chose to represent China. She easily would've been the top American competitor in all her events and a Wheaties Box idol - though granted that was not predetermined when she made her decision three years ago. Though I also am an outsider speculating, I think far less cynically about her decision. I think she just thought it would be fun. The Olympics will never be in China again in her lifetime, and it is so exhilarating to perform in front of a "home crowd." It is so much fun to appear in grand media appearances, smile on billboards, give interviews in Mandarin and be complimented on her fluency. Following her on Instagram, it seems she is soaking this all in.

Peeling back this successful stardom in China reveals the extent of colonialism in sports. Skiing in its many forms comes from Scandinavia and has spread largely through western culture. In fact, nearly every Winter Olympic sport and most Summer Olympic sports are essentially western sports. While the Olympics has tried to cultivate a reputation of facilitating truly global competition, they sometimes have the effect of facilitating Western dominance in sports they invented. All sports have regional differences based on culture, history, and access to equipment or facilities. It takes a lot of effort and time to bring sports to new countries. Skiing is particularly inaccessible, requiring snowy mountains, expensive resort infrastructure, personal equipment and instruction. No one raised in China will recreationally rise to become an elite skier at the level of skiers in Colorado or the Alps. China can only compete by intentionally finding good athletes as children and training them for these specific events. Gu is privy to her Chinese superstardom experience because she has the combination of being culturally adept in China and athletically trained in the US. It should be noted that Asian-American gold medalists like Chloe Kim and Nathan Chen don't experience the same sort of fame in South Korea and China, because they lack the ability and interest to connect with those countries.

My relevant experience is in ultimate frisbee, a sport invented in the 1970s in a New Jersey parking lot. When I played in college, there were tens of thousands of ultimate players in the US. When I moved to Hong Kong, there were around 100 regular players. The difference in level of play was enormous, and enabled an average collegiate player like me to represent Hong Kong in world tournaments. It was an honor and a thrill to attend these tournaments that were as grand as ultimate tournaments could get, wearing an official country jersey. Additionally it was meaningful to lift the level of play in Hong Kong, spread the wonderful sport to more people, and help this land where I go back 5 generations and love deeply. Even if I could represent the US, playing for Hong Kong provided a unique sense of fulfillment. I'm sure Gu felt similarly about representing China.

Regarding her citizenship, I found it pretty clear from her painful non-answers to pressing reporters that she had not given up her US passport. Admitting outright that she was receiving special treatment from the Chinese government would undoubtedly provoke a firestorm from Chinese netizens. My theory is that the Chinese government did make numerous unusual "nationality grants" to athletes in these Olympics - the Chinese hockey team was almost entirely American and Canadian. I certainly don't believe Gu will attend Stanford next year as an international student. This awkward nationality issue only arises because of China's strict rules and usually isn't an issue with European nations.

Hanging over this entire Olympics have been China's human rights abuses and general place in the global world order. What the CCP have been doing to destroy Uyghur and Tibetan identities are crimes against humanity, and I think I've made my feelings about the crackdowns in Hong Kong pretty clear. The authoritarian government in Beijing has taken a disturbingly nationalistic turn in the last decade, questioning whether these Games should've taken place there at all. When Eileen Gu wears the Chinese National Team outfit, she does in part represent that authoritarian government. However, she is also representing 5,000 years of history and the world's largest nation with a vibrant middle class. Accepting citizenship does not mean one condones everything that country has ever done, but rather that they accept the present whole, warts and all. We wouldn't like it if Russian media pressed naturalized American gymnast Nastia Liukin to answer for the invasion of Iraq. Neither should an 18 year old ski jumper be held responsible for mass internments in Xinjiang. 

The bottom line is that we shouldn't take sports allegiances too seriously. Athletes change allegiances and make surprising representation choices for all sorts of personal reasons which are rarely geopolitical in nature. We should want to move towards a world in which where one starts doesn't dictate where one ends up.

My Language Philosophy

 "I think I'm just not good at languages."

This sentence, which I hate so much,  came out of my mouth during my sophomore year in high school. I was choosing my classes for junior year, and I had decided to drop French. My high school offered Latin, French and Ancient Greek (yes, that's it), and I had taken the minimum amount of languages - 3 years of Latin, 3 years of French. I wasn't terrible at these classes, but I didn't feel like I had gotten much practicality out of them. 

Fast forward 15 years, and I consistently spend 2 hours a week studying languages. Some of these languages had provided a lot of practicality, such as helping me escape from a remote town after all flights were cancelled. Most importantly they have helped me connect with many people all over the world, creating lots of bidirectional laughs, knowledge exchange and reducing misunderstanding.

I now feel comfortable saying I can speak five languages, though I am insecure about all of them.  I've managed to do all this while possessing no real talent for language acquisition - in fact I believe I possess a below average memory and ear. 

And so I hate it when people say, "I'm not good at languages", especially when they say it in English. It usually betrays the speaker's position of privilege. It doesn't help that often they are ignorant of this privilege. This isn't a view I've found commonplace, but I'll recount how I developed it.

As with this blog, my language story begins in my summer of 2008 in Beijing. I had come into the city alone armed with one introductory year of Mandarin from college. I also had grown up speaking Cantonese, the Chinese language dominant in the south, but that was of limited use in this northern capital. Everything was terrifying at first. Taxi rides would begin with 5 minutes of me trying to say where I wanted to go before the driver would begin driving, and sometimes they never would. I would go everywhere with a notepad and jot it down in English all the points I wanted to express but couldn't and look them up when I got home. Slowly I began to converse, but listening remained very hard. People spoke so fast and the Beijing accent is famous for its slurring of syllables. At first I thought I couldn't understand anything because I didn't know the words. But Chinese is a language with a relatively sparse word domain - a lot of complex concepts involve the bundling of more elemental words. Very often people were saying words that I had learned, I just couldn't recognize them at live speed. I needed to train my ear, listen very attentively, and load up guesses based on context. 

In due time my ear got better and I was able to have conversations by the end of the summer, most commonly to taxi drivers about NBA players. It was a rush, feeling the improvement and being able to accomplish tasks easier and getting compliments. I remember talking to my building staff, who'd seen me progressed all summer, and observing real pleasure in their eyes when I said "慢慢走" at the end of a conversation, a phrase I'd heard dozens of times from service venues. The city slowly deciphered itself as I learned to recognize more characters.

During the Olympics, loads of foreigners came to town and I found myself useful linguistically. I could help people order cabs or ask for directions. Then sitting on the subway, I sat next to a French couple looking at the subway map, clearly trying to figure out where they were. Almost miraculously, though I had always been crap at listening comprehension in my French tests, I could understand them. I told them they were going the right direction and they could transfer in two stops, in French. I realized then how much French vocab I had stored in my brain, accumulated through all the homework and tests, but it was only now when my ear had progressed that I could actually perceive the words in spoken conversation.

Language acquisition is notoriously difficult to measure, and I can't find a definitive research source for it, but by all accounts the majority of the world is at least bilingual. This certainly jibes with my experience, as is the notion that this figure drops to 23% when examining just the United States. Not only is knowing multiple languages the norm in most places but monolingualism is associated with lack of education. Especially in the global south, inability to work in a "major" language can be a major hindrance to societal mobility. For the past two centuries, there has been no language more major than English, and it is amazing how different language acquisition is treated in English-speaking countries. In these highly developed countries, outside of immigrant communities, language acquisition is treated like an elective course. There is no link to economic advancement, and no stigma associated with monolingualism. In fact, it is common and socially acceptable to say the sentence I opened this blog with: "I'm just not good at languages." This educational domain, which is treated like a core human skillset like math or reading in much of the world, is treated with an optional "let's see if they have talent" mentality in the US. While there is a talent component to learning languages, it is not a prerequisite to becoming bilingual! You cannot tell me that every single Dutch or Filipino person is linguistically gifted. This success is due to the national education system and incentives of the citizens.

The lesson is not necessarily in replicating those educational systems. I believe people in English-speaking countries are bad at learning languages because they don't need or care to be, and that this attitude derives from a position of privilege. Learning a language as an adult is difficult, stressful, scary and full of embarrassing moments. You have to accept that you will be mocked and that your brain will feel like mush. And much of the world has to go through this process to enter the global economy. English speakers need not, and that is an immense step up. At this moment in time in the US, I find that privilege is spoken about within a national context, with a perspective of shining light on the struggles some Americans face that other Americans do not. But it needs to be spoken about with a global context, of all the powers that Americans, even Americans that lack privilege locally, have to step into another country without visa-stress and expect other people to understand them. 

This privilege is so pronounced when one lives abroad. The number of English speakers who have been living abroad for years without picking up the local language is astonishing. The legacy of colonialism and the hierarchies of international trade has allowed this to be generally socially acceptable. With this context in mind this, I find it unbelievably hypocritical when English speaking countries attack immigrants for speaking English poorly.

It is true that native English speakers have experiences unique to them that I've written about before, including some that make it more challenging to learn other languages. But the reality is that learning a language is hard for anyone. It takes a ton of time and pain, but it's a challenge that most of the world has accepted is important.

If you are truly interested in global equality, you have to learn at least another language, and preferably a non-Indo European one. Not only is the acquisition process crucial for developing empathy, but post-acquisition one can access knowledge channels outside of the ones colonialism setup. And it's fun and rewarding and useful. 

Personally, I find language learning a permanent part of my life. It is usually not a top priority and so I rarely study intensively, but I have 10 year plans for acquiring new languages (Vietnamese by age 40). Not only is it rewarding to be able to connect with whole new parts of the globe, but new grammatical structures and idioms shed new light on how humans think. Good luck with your language learning.

Trying to Follow ⚽ as an American Sports Fan

Expectations matter so much in our enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of an experience seems determined less by the quality of that experience and more by the difference of that quality from our expectation.  Have you ever come out of a concert or show disappointed because you were expecting it to be even more amazing? Or have nights etched into your memory because wonderful unexpected shenanigans happened? I enjoy sports because of the unexpected. While well-written dramatic shows and movies may contain fun surprises, we come to expect that unexpected. I go into watching Season 8 of Game of Thrones ready for some twists and incredible reveals. On the other hand, a sporting event can be utterly dull. That final buzzer beater can miss, the winning catch dropped. All those aborted dramatic moments however just serve to make the realized dramatic moments that much more incredible - they are rare enough that we can't expect them to happen. The sheer euphoria of a great sporting moment cannot be matched by anything scripted.

I think that is what makes ⚽ such a globally popular sport. Spectacular goals can come out of nowhere, and they can literally make all the different in a match result. Many goals are unexpected events of great consequences, being both amazing athletic highlights and swinging the result of the match. In the multiple text groups I have with other people concurrently watching matches, I find many texts simply saying "wow." While basketball, football, baseball and hockey are great sports in so many ways, I find that ⚽ produces the most unexpected wow moments.

I use ⚽ because despite the advancements that humanity has made in 2021, we still cannot have one name for the most popular sport on earth. Though I'd like to rant against the international disdain of the word soccer, a word coined by English people themselves from a weird shortening of "association football", I'll just stick to emojis to avoid controversy. But to vocabulary conventions, nowhere have I found British English and American English more different than when it comes to sports discussions. Where an American sports commentator may talk about how "that speedy youngster has been got the fans of his team excited with his streak of great play", an English commentary might say "that youthful lad with great pace is exciting his side's supporters with his good form of late." An American writing about differences to European ⚽ is hardly novel. In fact, there is an entire TV series birthed from this premise, the amazing Ted Lasso show. One of the show's gimmicks is the coach who serves as a "translator."

Ted Lasso:  And today's lesson is "trick plays." What do they call 'em here again?

Coach: Elaborate set pieces.

Ted Lasso: Yeah we're going to stick with trick plays, that's a lot more fun.

Following ⚽ is not exactly new for me. The first World Cup I remember following was in 1998, and I've followed closely every World Cup and European Championship since 2010. This isn't even my first blog post about this topic. But while I did drag myself out of bed at 3am for a Champions League final or two while in Hong Kong, I hadn't really followed the sport outside of these special tournaments. I'd recognize Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldinho when they showed up at the World Cup, but I didn't really know what club they normally played for. I've nominally been a Liverpool fan for several years, because their owners also own the Boston Red Sox, but I hadn't ever watched their regular season games.

The pandemic changed that for me. First, the German Bundesliga was really the first sport to emerge from the suspension of all sports. The English Premier League (EPL) came back a couple weeks later. The games generally took place weekday afternoons and weekend mornings, times that the pandemic made much more accessible. 

Each American sport and professional league is unique of course, but their commonality is revealed when compared to non-American systems. For example, each league is divided into conferences and divisions, have a playoff system, a draft, and clocks that count down (except for baseball). Coming from this context, there is a lot about European ⚽ that can appear quite whacky.

Each country has its own league. Sorry, I meant leagues. Each country has a system of tiered leagues with relegation rules, where in each league, the best teams go up and the worst teams go down. It's a brilliant system that makes matches exciting through the end of the season and eliminates "tanking," a problem endemic in American sports. What's less brilliant is the naming system of the leagues of England (+ Wales + Isle of Man + Jersey + Guernsey but not Scotland or Northern Ireland). Here are the top 3 Leagues:

1. Premier League

2. The Championship (not to be confused with the Champion's League)

3. League One

The names are a confusing legacy of history that defies modern design, much like how hereditary peers still maintain a real role in Parliament. 

In addition, basic assumptions that we have about sports in America are violated while watching ⚽. In American sports, the clock counts down. In ⚽ , and rugby, it counts up. In basketball and football (and ultimate), out of bounds is determined by where your feet are when you contact the ball. In ⚽, it's where the ball is. In all American sports, teams in a league qualify for a playoff tournament, and the winner of that playoff is the real champion. In the Premier League, every team plays each other twice for a total of 38 matches, and that's it - whoever has the most points at the end is the league champion. This does ensure that all regular season matches are meaningful, and you don't have arguments about who the real best team is, but can also result in an anti-climactic situation like Liverpool celebrating its 2020 championship when Manchester City lost their match.

But ⚽ also has playoffs. For European men and women, the Champions League is this very cool international competition between clubs that's essentially a 32 team tournament that follows a format with some similarities to the World Cup formats - except it's actually a 79 team tournament that allows the best teams from countries like Israel, Azerbaijan and Iceland to compete to be the champions of Europe. Four leagues are extremely strong - the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), with the French and Dutch leagues also producing top teams. Elite players often bounce around amongst these leagues, resulting in some intriguing international combinations and multilingual talents. Each league has different automatic Champions League entries - the Premier League gets 4 (out of the 32). These are the top 4 league finishers. Also, the reigning Champion League winner automatically qualifies, even if they don't finish top 4. Confused?

What's especially confusing is how these seasons occur simultaneously. The regular season runs from fall to late spring, and takes breaks for Champions League matches - as well as international friendlies where national teams, not clubs, compete. The top 4 English teams in 2020-2021 get to compete in the 2021-2022 Champions League, but these top 4 are determined while the 2020-2021 Champions League runs. The next top 3 qualify for a lesser tournament called the Europa League. The roster that qualified for a Champions League tournament will not be the same that competes in it, and it's quite common for a star player to help a team qualify then transfer to a club that faces the former club in the Champions League. Even more confusing is ⚽'s structure to do "loans" where a player goes to another club to get playing time while still technically on another club's payroll. This results in a situation like FC Barcelona's Philippe Coutinho scoring 2 goals and 1 assist for Bayern Munich against Barcelona. Lastly it is very possible for a club to have a disappointing season in their normal league (their domestic league) but have a great tournament run and win the Champions League. Was that a great season then? Fans are mixed. In England, most supporters would prefer to win the Premier League, aka be champions of England, than win the Champions League, aka be champions of Europe. Maybe this sheds some light behind Brexit.

I haven't even mentioned the individual nation's cups. Yes in addition to the domestic leagues and the Champions League, each country also has a tournament open to all teams in their many divisions. In England this is called the FA Cup, in Germany the DFB-Pokal. These are tournaments steeped in tradition, where lower division clubs have had memorable upsets of top flight ones. But in modern times they can seem to be an odd break in the schedule where top flight clubs play their benchwarmers against semi-professionals on haphazard pitches. 

Oh and there are other tournaments thrown in there. English teams also compete in the Carabao Cup, which is similar to the FA Cup except that I have no idea why it exists. There are some complicated rules regarding an automatic berth to the Europa League or something stupid like that. And none of this has anything to do with the Euros, or the World Cup, or anything in any other continent.

Sports can become a big institution, and when institutions get big, they get complicated. I know how complicated and weird many non-Americans find baseball and 🏈. Learning more about  ⚽ has allowed me to connect to so many more people around the world. One taxi driver in Costa Rica spent our entire ride recounting every single Costa Rican World Cup appearance. While basketball has incredible broad global appeal, how many moments do all basketball fans share? I struggle to think of any basketball play that every fan remembers - meanwhile, easily over half the globe remembers Germany 7, Brazil 1.  Despite all their corruption and faults, big sports help connect humanity, and I'm forever grateful for that.

Booksmart

 Reading between the lines:

“I’ve never read all these novels that are beautiful stories that have continued to have a resonance with people for so many generations, like beautiful works of art that I could read at any point. But instead, I choose not to read them and I just read the Internet. Constantly. And hear about who said a racial slur or look at a photo of what Ludacris did last weekend. Useless stuff. I read the Internet so much I feel like I’m on page a million of the worst book ever.” — Aziz Ansari 2015

I had not been prioritizing reading in my adult life when I heard this interview. I was learning from other people, learning from traveling, learning from professional experiences, but I wasn’t devoting time to sit hours on end alone with the words that someone else had carefully put together — words that may have already resonated, or would resonate, with millions of other humans.

In the intervening years I’ve been able to devote more effort towards this timeless pursuit, aided by three productive bouts of unemployment, as well as a biologically-induced prolonged period of reduced socialization. Additionally, as a data scientist, I naturally kept data. I manually recorded the books I read, the date I finished them, the gender and nationality of the author, the year of publication and the number of pages. It would eventually morph into an entrepreneurial pursuit revisiting the basics of knowledge consumption. But first it allowed me to generate graphs like this:

You can see a growth in reading starting in 2016, that took a dip in 2017, but has remained strong especially since 2019.

Meta-awareness of my library guided my future book choices. I tried to keep a balance of female and male authors, fiction and non-fiction. I even sought out to increase the countries of origins of my authors, including Sierra Leone, Ukraine, Turkey and Brazil. I chose to expand into areas of limited exposure, to dive deeper into areas of passion, and occasionally to read for pleasure.

During the pandemic, I discovered Goodreads, the social book cataloguing website owned by Amazon. Much of the data that I was manually tracking was available on Goodreads, plus much more. Goodreads makes available the number of users who have added a book, plus the number that have marked it as read, as well as allows the crowd sourcing of genres. Goodreads is also remarkably comprehensive — I’ve been able to find just about every book that I’ve read on the site. For maybe the first time in history, we can calculate the readership of each book. By randomly sampling the Goodreads database, I discovered that that distribution is incredibly skewed — the median book had had only 21 readers!!

A ton of books have exactly 0 readers on Goodreads — there’s a lot of self-published crap out there! These include such titles as “Jesus Christ — the Master Psychologist”, “James Earl Jones Stress Away Coloring Book: An Adult Coloring Book Based on The Life of James Earl Jones”, “La bruja del amor y el yonqui del dinero”, “My Child Won’t Be Sh*t”, “Typewriter Hard Enamel Pin”, and the retrospectively ironic “What’s Freedom of the Press?” Even removing these 0 reader books, the median readership comes out to 65. Less surprisingly, the top bestsellers have had nearly 10 million people add them on Goodreads. A log scale is required to make the plot above human readable.

Nearly all of us will have a readership distribution extremely different from that graph. By definition, popular books are popular. Below I’ve plotted my books and sorted them in log 10 tiers.

Generally we find that the vast majority of popular books are fiction, but here I’d like to focus on the 0–1000 books. These are the obscure reads, the ones no one hears about from recommendation engines or book review articles. My discovering them are unique stories in their own right — many reflect my more esoteric interests. In fact, three of them were recommended from a single podcast called Sinica. A few highlights are below.

• Wish Lanterns by Alec Ash (2017):

This book collates 9 lives of ordinary Chinese millennials, diving deep into their early adult lives. It gives personal stories that supplement the traditional narratives of China’s macro growth trends. Alec Ash was interviewed on Sinica and I figured it’d be a good read to further my understanding of China.

• The First Filipino by Leon Guerrero (1962):

I’ve long been fascinated by the Filipino national hero Jose Rizal, mostly due to his polyglot and polymath abilities. Sharp readers will find his novel Noli Me Tángere also on that graph. This may be the authoritative biography, which credits him with creating the concept of a Filipino state.

• Bastard Tongues by Derek Bickerton (2008):

I picked this up in a yard sale in DC in 2011. It’s about Creole languages around the world, and why so many of them are so similar. Bickerton rips to shred the prevailing theory, that these languages are similar due to contact, and proposes a new one that is still controversial in the academic community. His respect for Creole language speakers, many of who erroneously refer to their own speech as “broken”, is always apparent. This is an author I’d most like to grab a beer with.

• East and West by Chris Patten (1998):

The memoir written by the last governor of Hong Kong shortly after Hong Kong was handed over has not aged particularly well, but that’s part of its value too. I learned that Hong Kong’s GDP was ¼ of all of China’s in 1997, and so many of Patten’s predictions have gone so wrong mainly because China has grown so rapidly.

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933):

I’ve also long been fascinated by the 1920’s expat scene in Paris, which Gertrude Stein herself coined the Lost Generation. The creativity and output from that group is legendary. I’d analogized that period to the expat community in Beijing in the early 2000s, and was both validated and miffed to hear others independently make the same comparison. From what I’d read about this generation (you’ll find The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast up in that graph), I had high hopes for Stein, but I found her style impenetrable and the content quite dull. There are lots of mildly interesting anecdotes of famous artists like Picasso and Matisse, but I didn’t come out with any sense of who these people were. In fact, I left with the sense that maybe these people were famous because they were connected to other famous people.

• Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside by Quincy Carroll (2015):

Quincy was two years ahead of me in high school, and so when I learned he had written a fiction book about living in China, I felt duty call. It happens to be one of the better books about China that I have read, encapsulating third tier city life and the expat experience in a way that non-fictions do not. He writes about language in a novel way, allowing spectrums of bilingual experience to become accessible to non-Chinese speakers. In addition to the subject matter that resonated hard with me, the writing quality equally reminded me of our shared English teachers.

• The Transpacific Experiment by Matt Sheehan (2019):

This one shows up on the plot as [UNTITLED MATT SHEEHAN BOOK], which probably means the author needs a better publicist. In fact, Matt Sheehan is an ultimate player who lived in Xi’an and Beijing whom I played with and against on numerous occasions. An ultimate injury is the catalyst for this book, which forced him to pursue his China journalism career from Silicon Valley. Diving insightfully into China-US relations with regard to technology, academia and immigrant politics, Sheehan’s book even taught me to view my own family’s immigration story in a new light. He was also interviewed on Sinica about this book, which is deserving of a place in the shelf of anyone even casually interested in China. It is certainly deserving of a name.

• Rare Earth Frontiers by Julie Klinger (2017):

This was another deep, deep cut from the Sinica podcast. An academic text (I ordered it from the Cornell University Press), this book exemplifies the much misunderstood discipline of Geography. Klinger explores how rare earth (which is a misnomer) mining is more often influenced by domestic and international politics than by geological or economic factors. The regions where heavy, polluting mining is most exploited are typically borderlands far from the country’s metropoles, inhabited by minority ethnic groups.

• American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens (1842)

This is technically not under 1000 readers — somehow about 1300 people claim to have read this obscure travel journal of Dickens’ 1842 journey around the United States. It doesn’t make for light reading, but I sloshed through and found many gems ̶d̶e̶s̶c̶r̶i̶b̶i̶n̶g̶ judging cities that I know well — Boston, New York, DC, Cincinnati, St. Louis — but from a brand old historical perspective. Some quotes:

party feeling runs very high: the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins;

— -

THE beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, but many of its streets have the same characteristics; except that the houses are not quite so fresh-coloured, the sign- boards are not quite so gaudy, the gilded letters not quite so golden, the bricks not quite so red, the stone not quite so white, the blinds and area railings not quite so green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors not quite so bright and twinkling.

— -

Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there;

— -

Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be.

My takeaway from all this is that popularity is not very well correlated with quality — most of these unknown books are awesome. A book’s popularity is likely more correlated with how well-connected the author is, how accessible its subject is, and how well it is publicized. Additionally, I will describe at the end of this post some less obscure books that gave me great joy.

Goodreads allows you to export your books data, which includes useless information such as the binding and condition description, and does not include the crowd sourced shelf genres and number of total readers. Though Goodreads has also disappointingly disabled their developer API, I wrote code to scrape this information. I began soliciting friends to send me their exports, allowing the generation of plots like this one below.

Plotting out the distribution of read genres among multiple individuals taught me a lot about what I’m reading, what my friends are reading, and what we are not reading. Most conspicuous for me are the genres that are blank — Philosophy, Sequential Art (Graphic novels or comic books), Art, Feminism, Picture Books, Social Movements and True Crime. If you had straight up asked me, “Cal, do you read books about art?” I would have known no, I do not. But had I not seen this, I would not even have considered reading books about art to be a thing. To me, this is the real value of a crowd-sourced database like Goodreads, but not the direction that Amazon has been taking it. While it is primarily used to recommend new books similar to what you have enjoyed before, it can be used to show areas of literature that have been completely outside your purview.

Additional books I love:

• The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig (1942):

I was on vacation in Salzburg when I walked down a street named Stefan Zweig Way. Who is this person worth naming a street over I asked Wikipedia. It’s a rare person whose life is of such acclaim that a Wikipedia article written 70 years after their death makes clear their works are worth reading. I picked up his final book and couldn’t put it down. Written in 1942, the book is half memoir, half history as Zweig recounts the final decades of the Austria-Hungarian empire, World War I and the rise of Hitler through his eyes as a Jew born in Vienna. Multilingual and famous in his time, Zweig lived all over Europe and embodied a cosmopolitan, passport-less Europe that vanished in his lifetime. Chock-full of great anecdotes, Zweig’s writing is incredible even in translation. The sadness he feels over this loss is present throughout the narrative. With his partner, he fled Europe, eventually ending up in Petropolis, Brazil, where they finished this manuscript, sent it off to the publishers, then committed suicide the next day via barbiturates.

• Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein (2019):

Recommended by Amazon via their Great on Kindle program, this book has fundamentally changed the way I absorb news. Vox founder Ezra Klein persuasively demonstrates that our politics has become far more polarized throughout the past decade, why this was useful but is dangerous, and why our media consumption has created a feedback loop that demands more polarized media. Even though I have lived through much of the period of polarization, I hadn’t quite realized how many assumptions have fundamentally changed, as we have mainly gone from a society where our views dictated our political affiliation, to one where our political affiliation dictates our views. Serotonin and social media have allowed us to selectively choose stories with positive news about people we like and negative news about people we hate, leading to a population with polarized views of the truth. Of all the books I’ve listed so far, this is the most must-read of them all.

• Happiness by Aminatta Forna:

I read this book as part of a Georgetown Alumni book club. Forna, who is Scottish and Sierra Leonean, is currently a visiting Professor at Georgetown. While reading this novel, I couldn’t believe the degree of difficulty it must’ve taken to write it —while setting a love story and family drama amidst the backdrop of West African immigrant life in London, Forna had to become an expert researcher in coyotes, foxes and trauma psychiatry. Quotes include this one introducing a main character:

‘Your parents named you after Attila the Hun?’ Attila smiled. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘name their baby girls Victoria.’

And hits hard with gems like this:

Suffering had become a spectacle that served not to warn of the vagaries of misfortune but to remind the audience, sitting in warmth and comfort, of their own good fortune.

— —

I’m looking to expand on this idea, to demonstrate how literary meta-awareness can help guide us as we navigate life. I’m looking for more “users” — people to voluntarily export their Goodreads data and tell me if/how they find these analyses useful. I’m also looking for collaborators, who see value in what I’ve done and can offer further direction.

For more graphs and code, my Github link is below: https://github.com/cal65/Reading-History/tree/master/Books

Pura Vida

Pura vida.

This literally translates into "pure life," but after hearing this phrase daily for a month, I'm not sure it's really translatable. I've heard it used as a greeting, a farewell, a thank you, an encouragement and as an acknowledgement of agreement. It reminds you to live your life in a way that's pure in a Costa Rican sense. Pura vida beseeches tranquility and nature, a taking of your time that I, as an unrepentant urbanite, have difficulty grasping.  Along with the word "mae" (meaning something like "dude"), pura vida distinguishes the Spanish of Ticos and Ticas (Costa Ricans), though the phrase itself originates from a 1956 Mexican film of the same name.

Pura vida may claim responsibility for the highest quality of life in Central America. It is definitely responsible for the extreme passage of time between a waiter collecting your finished meal and bringing you the check. Pura vida also demands the acceptance of inconvenience when you inevitably come across a delay in the narrow roads that criss-cross the mountainous country. Pura vida and its free-spiritedness may run counter to social responsibility during a global pandemic, but cases were relatively contained here and as of November 1, tourism was fully reopened.

Traveling during the pandemic opens oneself to risk and disparagement, and I very much had to battle wanderlust with my obligations as a public health citizen before committing to work remotely in Costa Rica for a month. Though the packed flight to Miami was unnerving, arriving in San Jose I knew I'd made the right choice. The temperate climate and strict adherence to masks and hand-washing made socializing less fearful. Indeed it was strange to interact with a populace, that while cohabitating this same pandemic reality, had not been through the same degree of suffering. I never got sick in Costa Rica, and I tested negative when I returned.

San Jose has its charms - plazas that love their sculptures, tropically-vegetated streetscapes, baristas mixing flat whites, and a gaudy Chinese-built stadium (that doubled as a bribe to unrecognize Taiwan) - all surrounded by green hills.  However the bulk of the urban area consists of unremarkable stretches of crumbling concrete interlaced with barbed wire and a smoky commuter train that blows through town at 20 MPH and 100 decibels. The Museo Nacional de Costa Rica itself used the word "backwater" of the Spanish Empire in describing the history of the region. As a result, it lacks the stately buildings and charming old quarters of Panama City, Bogota or San Juan. Many American tourists never spend a minute in the city. I spent ten days there, working from my Airbnb apartment in a high rise in Barrio Escalante. I arrived to an Indian dinner on Diwali (which I dubbed chicken tica masala), attended a Peruvian protest, played ultimate frisbee, picked coffee beans, climbed to the rim of a volcano only to see fog, and spoke a lot of Spanish.

My main adventure began with renting a car on Thanksgiving Day. By strict UN member nation accounting, Costa Rica is my 40th country visited, but this was my first time extensively driving outside the United States. I had been apprehensive, but like the rest of the trip, once I got started I knew it'd been a good idea. The streets of San Jose are chaotic, but outside the city they are fairly straightforward. The danger was getting distracted by the verdant scenery, which ranged from novel to breathtaking. Though Monteverde is to the northwest, my journey started due west down jungly mountains to the sparkling Pacific coast that left me gasping and craning my neck left. 

By now my Spanish was good enough that when I saw signs saying "Puente Angosto," I knew to slow down. In Costa Rica, most roads taper into a single laned bridge over water. Perhaps originally this made engineering or financial sense, but by now short two way bridges surely can't be hard to construct, even in remote areas. I suspect people have become so accustomed to them though that they can't cross water in two directions anymore. 

Continuing up the coast, I turned onto the grand-sounding Pan American Highway. This stretch was basically a humble two-lane backroad. The turnoff to Monteverde was even more minor, to the extent that I missed it completely. I continued down the "highway" looking for a turnoff, but found nothing suitable until suddenly the car in front of me stopped. As far as the eye could see, some mysterious event had frozen traffic. As I sat there idling on the wrong road, I wondered, can I pull a U-turn on this Pan American Highway? I slowly got the courage to peek over the meridian, and seeing no oncoming traffic, pulled an excruciating 10 point turn and scampered out. 

Driving views

Later I drove past a peaceful cow pasture and realized I'd missed another turn, this one even more unobtrusive. Doubling back, I saw a shortcut on Google Maps. However when I turned onto the shortcut, I screeched into a stretch of gravel and dirt leading into a farm, complete with roving cows. Were it not for a pair of tire tracks going through, I wouldn't recognize it for a "road." Instant regret. As I jackhammered my way over the rocks, I could hear my bumper getting scratched and hoped the rental agent wouldn't get too particular. 

Monteverde felt like a small ski town, with lodgings scattered across miles of thin winding dirt roads but a built up downtown belying its population. My two night stay at the Selina hotel (a Portuguese chain that has caught fire over Costa Rica), was punctuated by hot tub drinking with a Dutch couple, an American couple, and a German-educated Costa Rican programmer. The Tico programmer, whom I offered a job, explained pura vida as well as he could. "Sometimes you get to a road and they're doing repairs for an indefinite amount of time, and you have to go pura vida and wait. But I'm not sure this is good. The Germans wouldn't like it."

The vaunted Cloud Forest preserve was within walking distance of my Selina, and I set out at 7am for I was told that the mountaintop would get foggy quite early. I beelined to a pinnacle quickly, from where I was supposed to be able to see both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. For the second time though, I hadn't the foggiest idea where they might be. On the way back, I aimed to cross an iconic red hanging bridge, that bridge that occupies slot #2 in a Google image search for "Costa Rica travel." However I found that the path was blocked by yellow tape printing out "PRECAUCION." This just sparked my curiosity, and I walked around the tape ad hiked toward the bridge. Arriving at the bridge, I found this:

Why was it closed? Why hadn't anyone, including the guide who recommended this trail, warned me about this? Was this worth sneaking onto? Taking a hard look at the whole bridge, the far end did not look entirely flat, I figured it was closed for good reason. Typical 2020. Pura vida.

Monteverde is also famous for canopy zipline tours. I booked one and arrived early, chatting with the guides David and Raul until I realized I was the only customer. Still two guides are needed to run a zipline safely, and bashfully I wondered if they were losing money on my transaction. I'm not a big fan of heights-based adrenaline activities, like roller coasters, but I'd gone ziplining once before in Laos, and hadn't found it scary. However the start of the tour was a "Tarzan swing," in I was tied to a rope and aggressively pushed off a high structure to pendulum down and up 50 feet over the jungle. After recovering from that, the ziplining was fantastic. The longest line spanned 800m across a valley, over a public road, with spectacular views of the thick jungle. The path of the tour included climbing up the inside of a hollow tree - actually a Ficus tree that had long since surrounded and strangled another tree. Most surprising to me was the platforms with no guard rails. Zipping in with momentum, I would land and cling to the cables with an illogical sense of fear. I recall the ziplines in Laos having more built-up landing platforms. I wonder if Laos had ever been compared favorably in the development game before.

One night, I found a roadside chicken griller who sold me a pincho de pollo (chicken skewer) for 800 colones ($1.30), and wrapped it in a flour tortilla for free. At an adjacent convenience counter I asked for a glass bottle of coke for 500 colones. That cashier asked me where I would drink the coke. Confused, I pointed to the grill, and she gave me a set of instructions that I gradually understood to involve returning the bottle to her. I took this as another example of Costa Rica's environmentalism. While eating the skewer and chatting with the griller, Antonella, a black Escalade pulled up. An Asian-American woman got out and misinterpreting what I was eating, asked for a taco. When she didn't understand Antonella's reply, "con papas o con ensalada?" I found myself translating from Spanish to English for the first time in my life. I finished the skewer and returned the coke bottle with a "pura vida."

On Sunday I began my leisurely drive down to Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca) on the Caribbean coast, where I would spend the week working. I had researched wifi availability on this small beach town, and learned that Banana Azul, the fanciest resort, did have a high speed connection. However, they were full on Sunday, so I booked them for Monday to Friday and found another place for Sunday night. I was slightly worried about the logistics of Monday morning work, but I figured pura vida, it'll be alright.  I took my time, stopping in a random remote restaurant outside Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui (it's confusing) which doubled as a house, and befriending the staff/residents. Later I found the road filled with stopped cars and a couple motorcycles. Clearly unspecified roadwork was going on, so I shrugged and thought, this requires pura vida. Slowly cars accumulated behind me until I couldn't see the end of the line, while the motorcycles ahead of me multiplied. 45 minutes in, my pura vida was expiring and had I trusted my Spanish more I may have started yelling at the construction crew. There was no communication whatsoever. Finally they let us through, and we drove through a half mile of windy dirt road being paved and passed an even longer vehicle queue on the other side.  When I reached the main Route 32 to Limon, I saw construction doubling its width, often assisted by massive machinery with names in Simplified Chinese. The scenery evolved from rainforest into endless banana farms. The Boston-based United Fruit Company's (now Chiquita) had built the railroad from San Jose to Limon and birthed the term "Banana Republic" into existence. I wondered if they still owned these farms. Suddenly, my phone, with a Costa Rican sim card installed, rings and I perplexedly answer. "Hello this is Alamo....are you going to return your car today?" Like that, my pura vida was interrupted by contractual obligations. I found out that the Alamo in Puerto Viejo closes at 5pm, figured I was on track for about 4:05, and said no problem, pura vida.

I quickly drove through Limon, past a massive cemetery and a small airfield, and alongside the ocean. Driving along the Caribbean coast was another spectacular experience, especially having driven along the Pacific only a few days before. Approaching Puerto Viejo, the road got smaller but the cars got wider. Not long ago Puerto Viejo was a small fishing village that wasn't even connected by road to the rest of Costa Rica, settled largely by black Jamaican immigrants. Many had arrived during the railroad-building in the 1870's, and their descendants still generally speak English and Spanish. Now it is a destination internationally well-known for its surfing waves, but as I discover the roads have not grown proportionally. Puerto Viejo is essentially a one street town, and that street lacks the width for cars and bikes to cohabitate. Further space competition comes in the form of large tour buses and pedestrians, the majority beach drunk. The townspeople seem to be embodying pura vida but as it ticks past 4:15 I am increasingly not.  I end up putting my car in neutral and edging into the trespassing pedestrians, one of whom slams my trunk in response. I took deep breathes, and repeated "pura vida" to myself, though I was bursting with anxiety. I couldn't wait to check in, ditch the car, and drink on the beach.

I finally reach my lodging and execute a painful parallel park. "Qué tal Rasta?" the receptionist greeted me in an Afro-Caribbean manner that I absolutely love. "Tengo una reservacion," I respond, and the receptionist gives me a quizzical "reservacion?" reply. Frustrated, I pull out my confirmation email and the receptionist goes "ah, Expedia. They do this a lot. They allow you to book, but there's no room to book." I was fairly stunned - this has never happened to me before. I would've been angry, but I figured there's been so little tourism, I'll find something else. The hotel next door had 1 room remaining. "I don't think you want it though," said the receptionist. "It's our honeymoon suite." I felt a bit judged by that and inquired about the price. "$160." I figured I'd find better options elsewhere. Looking around the unpaved side streets, I found I didn't, and authoritatively strolled back into the hotel offering: "$140." The receptionist got on the phone with her boss, and came back with, "sorry but no." I huffed away and got in my car. I had only 5 minutes to get to Alamo.

I did make it in time, and despite that pounding on the cattle farm, incurred no damage fees. I grabbed all my bags and started going door-to-door, from hotel to guesthouse to inn. Each one was full. Finally I asked a guy, "what's going on here? Why is everything full?" In Monteverde everything was at like 30% capacity."  The guy looked at me with profound sympathy. "Ah mae, it's a holiday tomorrow." That's when I knew I was in real trouble. If I had a set of rules for traveling, somewhere below "never take your phone out in the bathroom of a moving train" would be "be aware of local holidays." This has happened to me before. Puerto Viejo was not full of international tourists - it was full of Ticos/as at the beach for the 3 day weekend. 

I hurry back to the hotel with the honeymoon suite and I sweep in, sweaty and disheveled, proclaiming, "I'll take it!" The receptionist looks at me again and says, "I'm so sorry. I just gave it away." "You're kidding me." I sit down in their lobby couch, dejected. "Have you tried Rockin J's?" suggested the receptionist. 

I head down the main road, maneuvering past the oversized tour buses and carefree beachgoers, carrying all my luggage in this hot beach town. The first part of Rockin J's that I glimpse is its barbed wired fence. The second part is the tents, rows and rows of tents. They occupy the entire second floor of what looks like a hastily built shelter, with wooden columns holding up a corrugated metal roof. I can't help but think it looks like a refugee camp. Warily, I approach the front desk. "Do you have a room? ....with walls?" "Yes of course, we have one left." This receptionist takes me past some surfer bros smoking weed in hammocks, up a set of metal stairs and into what looked like a compartment of a small tanker ship. The compartment door is shut via padlock, and the receptionist spends 10 seconds fiddling around to unlock the padlock, and chunks of rust flake off in the process. Finally voila the door opens up and I see a bunk bed, with a needlessly high top bunk and a bench where the bottom bunk should be, and a visibly sticky floor. "Shared bathroom over here, shared showers down stairs. Beach access over there." This was a place I would've enjoyed in my early 20's, perchance even bragged about. "I stayed in Puerto Viejo for $15!" But now, with Agile sprint practices and customer delivery dates in my head, I thought to myself, "I've made too much money for this." Audibly however, my mouth resignedly said, "I'll take it."

That wasn't even the end though. I went to take a shower, and heard two French voices occupying the two shower stalls and patiently waited my turn - until I realized the two voices occupied the same stall. I entered the other stall, and found instead of a showerhead and faucet, there was just a PVC pipe, and a spigot. The spigot would allow no flow of water whatsoever until suddenly it would allow a slice of Niagara Falls to spurt out. As I stood getting hosed by PVC water in this Costa Rican beachside hostel/refugee camp with thin shower walls, I thought to myself, this wasn't even my first time getting too close to a lovemaking French couple in a cheap lodging. What sort of life decisions had I made to end up here? Later as I sat alone on the beach, sipping a beer and watching the Caribbean waves crashing down, I felt like a stereotypical middle-aged divorcee.

The next morning, I got up early, called a cab, and moved from the cheapest hostel to the nicest hotel in town. I settled in the hotel lobby, connected my air pods and got on my 10am zoom with my boss as if it was a normal Monday morning.

Pura vida.