Agents’ Meeting in Costa Rica

Things started well for this year’s Air France agent’s meeting with a free agent’s ticket from TACA at the insistence of Johnny Searle, the Belize TACA agent. There was a mistake in my original reservations, so not only was there not space for me to spend a final day in Guatemala en route home, but I could not even get out of San José on the Saturday to spend the extra day in Salvador.

 

The trip south was pleasant enough. In Salvador, where we had to change planes, TACA put us on one aircraft, then marched us off and onto another. No problem. If something’s wrong with the plane, I applaud the conservative decision.

It was nearly 8:00 pm when we reached San José. The Migración (Immigration) officer lectured me on the idiocy of getting a tourist card, which I did not need when I had a passport. It was too much trouble to explain to him that the TACA agent in Salvador had insisted that they would not let me into Costa Rica without one as she happily collected my us$2.00.

Customs waved me through without looking at my luggage. As I was looking for a taxi, a familiar woman called to me, and the driver with her waved a sign at me with my name on it. Air France had sent a car for Rosario Sánchez of Honduras and me on our early arrival for the conference. Rosario, I soon learned, spoke no English. Good practice for me.

 

The Hotel Herradura was a low, sprawling building in pretty grounds. Neither Rosario nor I was prepared to be told that we had to share a room. She protested in Spanish, and I in English. The smiling reservations clerk explained that they did not have another room in the house. He promised that we could have separate rooms the next day.

Rosario and I decided to be extra polite to each other to overcome any impression of dissatisfaction. The room was pleasant enough. Rosario had been given a handsome arrangement of fruit when we checked in. This should have alerted me to the fact that I was the interloper, but that didn’t occur till the next day. We both were tired, so took turns bathing and went to bed.

 

The next morning I awoke at my usual 5:00 am. Rosario was still asleep. I lay quietly, not even dozing, for two hours, thinking of the coffee I did not dare make for fear of waking my room companion. The telephone finally saved me at 7:00, when someone rang for Rosario. She cheerfully told me to go on and make my coffee while she went back to sleep. The day looked slightly better.

Neither of us wanted breakfast. Instead, we took off to see the craft shops. We thought. Both of us had read the big book about Costa Rica that was in our room. Rosario thought we should head for the principal market. En route the driver explained that we would find only vegetables, flowers, and meat there. We offered an alternative destination, but he still drove us into the center of town past the market so he could show us.

The center of San José is a place I disliked on my first trip to the city and learned to loathe on this one. Traffic moves so slowly that it takes two or three changes of traffic lights to traverse one short block.

Our driver finally emerged from el centro (downtown) and spun us rapidly through a maze of streets to a charming mall. He got out to inquire and came back to report sadly that it had no craft shops.

To our horror, we discovered that we were returning to el centro. If anything, the traffic was worse. After another half-hour, our exuberant driver parked with a flourish and ushered us from the car. We were at a plaza filled with kiosks. Handcrafts, yes, but of the tackiest sort; stall after stall of junk. The plaza gave onto a street lined with more kiosks, closed off temporarily as a pedestrian mall.

At the driver’s repeated queries about what we were looking for, when we really were only looking at, I responded that I needed a basket. He rushed us from one basket display to another, sadly realizing that I was not going to buy a basket decorated in pink and lavender with a garish Costa Rica embroidered on it to demonstrate provenance.

Suddenly we found ourselves in front of a stall with handsome straw and reed work, quite different from everything else we had seen. I saw exactly the size and style basket I wanted. The pleasant Oriental young woman in charge explained that it was for display. I was taken aback until I looked around carefully and realized that we were in an exhibition from Mainland China.

Ultimately we reached a shop in which I spotted a plain basket of something similar to what I wanted. The driver was ecstatic. He leaped about taking down bag after bag, grabbing from me the one I was examining to point out a flaw. He finally selected the one I wanted (?) and was gracious enough to let me pay for it.

 

By the time we returned to the hotel, the Air France group had arrived from Mexico City. The front desk sent me off with a bellman to move my things from Rosario’s room. It was a quick process and I soon found myself in an identical room in another wing. A fruit arrangement with card bearing my name welcomed me.

It was a joy to find myself surrounded by silence, able to unpack and settle into my temporary abode. The small bug climbing a wall in the dressing area didn’t worry me.

 

We joined the gathering Air France group for lunch at a long table in a charming open-air restaurant. The buffet was varied and slightly better than ordinary in quality.

Our first session began mid-afternoon. I settled down to a few hours of speeches in Spanish, which I understood to a slightly less than complete degree. The information given was interesting and it was fun to be back with old friends.

We broke up around 6:00 pm and were told that it was an open evening. My young friend Tom Kenna from Panama had his wife and children with him and suggested that we meet for dinner around 8:30.

 

I went up to my room to relax and dress for dinner. To my horror, the bathroom floor was black with what looked like large black ants. I called Housekeeping. Literally moments later a very worried woman and a steely-eyed man brandishing a tin of Raid appeared at my door. They stalked in, apologizing as they went. A great fog of Raid demolished every moving thing, almost including the three humans. As they turned to leave, the man assured me that the bugs would not bite.

I wiped the dead bugs off the floor with toilet paper; wiped up newly defunct ones that, in foolhardy fashion, emerged from cracks around the door frame onto the oily floor; and somehow managed to bathe and dress for dinner.

 

At about 8:00 I went down, thinking that I might find some of the group in the bar. I did, but Rosario stopped me at the entrance saying that she had been asking for me. She explained that “the young people” had gone off to a movie as she led me back to the same restaurant. We had a pleasant dinner by ourselves, then separated for an early evening.

 

Congratulating myself on my private room and leisure to enjoy it before bedtime, I walked into a reinfested bathroom. The “ants” were everywhere, black against the floor and walls. I sprayed them with the Raid, which I had insisted on keeping. The horde expired in satisfactory fashion.

I undressed and retired to bed to read. It was impossible to concentrate. The air was almost unbreathable from insecticide. Looking up, I saw to my horror that, by ones and twos, the ants were moving across the carpet toward my bed.

I called the front desk, explained the situation, and asked if any of the other three rooms in our little area of the corridor was vacant. I was prepared to pack up and move in my night clothes, if necessary. Unfortunately, all rooms were occupied.

Furious, I wiped up dead bugs, which by now I was sure were wingless termites; sprayed vigorously; and pulled the covers over my head as useless protection against the fumes. It was not a restful night.

Waking early on Friday morning became a delight when I found only a few dead bugs and no live ones. It was even more pleasant because I could fix my coffee and return to my warm bed to enjoy repeated cups along with the new Dick Francis novel I was reading.

I luxuriated in a leisurely bubble bath, then dressed in my best executive style for the new session.

 

It was a full day of Spanish, except for the few moments when I gave my brief report in English. Fortunately, most of the group spoke excellent English, so I could relax during informal periods. Tom sat next to me and made sure that I caught important points during the session. Usually I had, but sometimes I had missed or misunderstood something.

Tom laughed about the night before. He and Charlotte had not gone out, as Rosario thought; friends had hurried them into an early supper with their two young children.

 

The conference ended with a formal dinner in the hotel’s main dining room. Our long table, with starched pink damask napery and the most exquisite arrangements of pink and white roses I ever have seen, was set with a lavish array of rose-patterned china and sufficient silver to promise several courses.

The senior delegate from Costa Rica firmly led me to a seat next to our charming regional manager, M. Richard. He is an attractive young Frenchman with an amusingly informal manner. On the other side was a bright young man from Guatemalan whom I had met before.

And across the table was the head of the Air France cargo service in Mexico City. I had spent a fascinating half-day with M. Brettoniere when I was there for training a couple of years ago. I was getting dizzy studying the complications of calculating fares and writing airline tickets. It was a relief to have the guided tour through the cargo area, because I understood everything he pointed out.

M. Brettoniere is being transferred to India soon to sort out Air France’s growing cargo operation there. I enjoyed having one more chance to visit with him before he leaves our side of the world.

 

Saturday I was on my own. Most of the Air France group left early. I hired a taxi again to go shopping, this time returning to Moravia, a town at the edge of San José that has a street lined with craft and souvenir shops. It was familiar from my first trip to San José. I picked up uninspired small gifts, saw nothing of particular interest, and wasted a lot of time and money, half of it on taxi fare.

The one thing that caught my attention was a particular shop’s display of realistically painted snakes made of small discs of wood. The snakes ranged in size from 6-foot “pythons” to lethal-looking slimmer, life-size “coral snakes.” A bushel basket full of intertwined snakes greeted one at the entrance to the shop. Eerie. The articulation made their movement shockingly realistic. I know because I picked one up.

My instantaneous thought was to buy one for my grandnephew Will Bryan, who will be spending a week with us over the Easter holiday. Then I remembered that his mother Marcia was so terrified of snakes that she would not even permit the word in her presence. On the very rare occasions when snakes had to be discussed during the time Marcia and Alex Bryan lived in Belize, she referred to them as S’s (pronounced ESS-es). Marcia would kill me either before or after her heart attack, if I gave one to Will.

Everywhere I went in the shop, I found a snake nestled among or appearing to protect more innocuous goods. Although I pride myself on tolerating snakes quite nicely, they finally unnerved me so that I fled to the next store.

It was a relief to return to my hotel room and order a beer and chef’s salad to be enjoyed in privacy.

 

Sunday morning my alarm rang at 3:15 am. I had time to enjoy my coffee before dressing and closing suitcases for departure. By 5:00, I was at the airport. So were a minimum of 75 people, determined to get on the same plane. The single TACA agent processed passengers at an excruciatingly slow rate. I toyed with the possibility of my being bumped from the flight because of my agent’s ticket.

To my amusement, I got royal treatment instead when I finally reached the desk. The young man looked at my ticket, raised his eyebrows, and breathed, “You’re TACA!” I smiled and said nothing. Later it occurred to me that, given my age and my tailored suit in contrast to the tee shirts around me, he probably assumed that not only was I TACA, but I might be Really High Brass.

 

Standing endlessly in line, a handsome, tall, blond young man started talking to me. It developed that he was stationed in Belize with the soon-to-depart British Army. We awaited our plane together and I learned that Dan was returning from a short holiday. He hadn’t had time to see the countryside, but had found plenty of beautiful Costa Rican girls to help pass the time. One, he confided, he intended to write to later.

The flight from San José to Salvador was uneventful. I was amused to receive a good breakfast, knowing that somewhere in the back of the plane Dan was devouring his. He had been up all night (“No point trying to go to bed for an hour”) and had admitted that he was starving.

Dan joined me again when we settled in the Salvador airport awaiting our flight to Belize. The plane was there, but so were some men crawling in and out of one of the engines. Delays were announced. Dan settled down with a Walkman and earphones, and promptly fell asleep.

He awoke about 10:00, two hours after our scheduled departure time. I asked if he would like me to buy him a beer. We wandered together down the long corridor to the snack bar. I had a slight boggle thinking I did not have enough US money left after having paid taxi fare the day before, but found a $10 bill I had overlooked. We sat down to enjoy our beers and watch a soccer match on TV. After a bit, I left Dan to his soccer and returned to the departure lounge.