So I will give a warning here: this is going to be a negative posting. Sorry.

Well it was bound to happen and I’m impressed it took me till the 4th week to hit the blues wall. Likely being sick didn’t help but being around people 24/7 for 4 weeks I’m sure was more of a factor. This hotel sucks – there is no privacy, the walls could be made of paper. I was woken one night by the couple next door doing the dirty & they weren’t even being wild things for goodness sake. Babies, loud French people who I mistook for CNN cause they never seemed to stop for a breath. Oh the Lord of the Flies young bucks who cannot do anything quietly since loud mean virile! Of course the old German buck has to keep pace and then the unneutred dogs just don’t stop, all night long they bark and when they need  a rest the neighborhood dogs take over. ARGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

A small black cat who had obviously been thrown away found me amongst all the other possible people, she sits at my door confidant in her choice. Heart breaking. I let her sleep with me 2 nights and then realize this isn’t good. So I make a pact that I will feed her but I can’t let her in and bond. I can’t do that. I buy cat food and leave it out for her in the morning and at night but she also wants affection so bad. Lots of tears. Guess who is now making happy hands beside me on the bed? Yeah. I just heard one of the guys yelling at her outside so I stuck my head out and called her quietly and she came. Jorge told me this morning that she’s been sleeping in the empty rooms cause the morons leave the doors open if no one is booked in them. She’s looking a bit rough around the edges like she’s been taking a bit of a licking. So the plan is that I will take her to the vet to get her spayed and I might have found her a home. Say a prayer for her.

On the way to the vet today I cycle by a horse that was standing in a field looking like it was literally starving to death. I get to the vet and in the corner is a dog in the same condition. Animals are treated like things, though most of these people would treat their furniture better than they do their animals. Dogs especially are often only seen as valuable as guard dogs and to make them better at that they are often beaten, starved and chained and tormented till they are mad. Or people just toss them away when they are the least bit inconvenient. There are loose dogs all over, roaming around eating out of garbage, unneutered (of course… someone told me that the machismo male can’t stomach the idea of castration… so let me get this straight – they don’t care enough to feed or take any responsibility for the dog but when it comes to their balls that’s where they draw the line?)

Let me tell you that Costa Rica is not all that it is cracked up to be. It is not this environmentally advanced nation that the rest of the world should look to for leadership. There are a few committed people, a good many of them are ex-pats but the rest … well the bottom line rules in Costa Rica as much as it does on Wall Street. And there is nothing like money to make people notoriously short-sighted, that there are all kinds of costs that accountants never take into account. There are tons right here but when you get off the beaches and out of the bars it is often not pretty.

So here I am in paradise-not with no privacy or quiet, no support system, nothing familiar and surrounded by abused animals. Not surprising I am having a few bad days.

I did angst about posting this (on top of everything else I was angsting about) but I started this blog wanting to honestly explore what it would be like for a woman my age to travel alone and this is obviously part of the experience, at least for me. And I thought what if someone else has gone through this and feels like she’s the only one that has, kind of like I do?

Oh and big on my long list of sucky things… pc notebooks and crappy internet connections… it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. In the middle of doing something my screen tells me that it is unable to connect with that web site at this time. ? Or I will be constantly logged out of the internet access. Or I’ll be typing along and suddenly my cursor has moved and I am now typing in the middle of a previous paragraph. The screen fades in and out like it is haunted and it freezes on a regular basis.

La gato pequena negra is currently stretched out beside me on the bed, likely the safest she has felt since the last time I let her stay. I just can’t turn her out.

So hopefully tomorrow will be better. It has already started, I took a long walk on the beach this afternoon and treated myself to a wonderful dinner and I will let my friend keep me company for tonight at least and I will deal with the fall out tomorrow but for tonight she will be safe.