Flip Flops to Sandals
May 10, 2022
I arrived in San Jose yesterday. I made the transition from shorts to pants and a sweater fairly quickly. The transmutation from beach girl hair to professional hair took a bit longer, but happened with only a few credit card glitches.
What was more interesting though was the difference in the vibe. I am not a beach girl living with a full time partner in a remote area of Costa Rica. I am a solo traveller with professional looking hair and a subtle conversation style. I am now starting to mix with the mainstream. I tend to be-friend people quite quickly. I was in a taxi with another solo female North American traveller last night. I realized what the mainstream thinks of people like me. They think we are crazy! To them we are the subset of the population that went crazy during covid. My new friend was in a long term relationship with someone who I assume thinks independently like me and their relationship dissolved over the division in society since the covid era.
We could talk openly and even intimately about all topics except one.. vaccines.
This is where we are at in society. The safety of the Covid vaccines are the forbidden fruit, the dangerous topic that can not be discussed unless you want to be shunned.
When I got my hair done yesterday for the first time in 8 months, it was an interesting experience as my Spanish is not great and I had a very kind translator come and tell my hair dresser what I wanted done. It was one of the first days when the mask mandate and mandatory childhood vaccine mandates were lifted in Costa Rica. Many people still wore masks. When I would make a new friend, they would want to greet me with a fist pump, not a handshake. After my partner encouraged them to do a hand shake the first thing this person said was, "OMG. Now you are going to tell me you don't believe in vaccines or something". We skirted around the issue and it became obvious that many of the people who have had the covid vaccines are actually scared of the people that haven't. P.S. I have all of my vaccines except the one that was advertised the most lol.
What an eye opening day it was yesterday.
Twitter seems to be more interesting these days. This is a recent tweet of one of the speakers at one of the conferences I am assisting.
Today, I fly to Switzerland. One step closer to meeting all the colleagues I have worked with the past two years.