Urqu Kinraypi: Costa Rica, the Miniseries, vol. 4

On the night of the rehearsal dinner, the complications began to arise...

Just as the wedding party is finishing up speeches after a tasty dessert at a gourmet restaurant, a sudden cut in music and light changes the mood in the party. In a group of 30 where probably only five or ten people have previously left the States, rumors begin to take wing. Quotes from the evening: “Did you hear that power is out in the whole country”; “Yeah, it’s out in all of Panama and Nicaragua, too”; “Within a couple days we’ll be cutting through the jungle with machetes searching for food”; and my favorite, “We really should stick together, being that we’re next to the two biggest drug producing countries in the world: Panama and Cuba.” In my own delight, I added my own quotes to the evening’s tension: “Did you guys hear that Fidel Castro is invading Costa Rica for its rich phosphorous resources?” and “Did you guys hear that the Dixie Chicks just died in a plane crash on the way to Costa Rica because the runway lights were out?”

In the end, one of the rumors did end of being true, and sadly it wasn’t the one about the Dixie Chicks or the one about Fidel Castro. As hard as it was for me to believe that such a thing could happen, even in a developing nation, the power really DID go out in all of

Costa Rica

for about 8 hours that night. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that I had made fun of the wedding party in vain. When the lights came back on at about 4 AM, we were still enjoying the pool party with portable music and quickly-warming beer. Cheers erupted across Costa Rica, and the fears of Dixie Chicks fans across Central America were quickly assuaged.

The view of the pool from the 3rd-story balcony.