Bridge Year Costa Rica – Spring 2025

“Llueve, llueve!”

It’s one in the afternoon, and the rain has begun to fall. Clothes hang across the patio, draped on lines that encircle the house. Your grandmother, the first to hear the drops tapping on the zinc roof, dashes across the yard clutching an armful of clothes. The alarm spreads from house to house until the neighborhood bursts with it: “It’s raining, it’s raining! It’s raining, it’s raining!” By the time you rush outside, ready to help, your grandmother has already gathered all your clothes and hands them to you with a smile. Inside, with your shirts and shorts neatly folded in their places, you hear the drip-drip of water from the faucet and the rhythmic patter of rain outside.

In the center of San Isidro, you stroll through streets packed with pharmacies, pulperías (small grocery stores), boutiques, sodas (open-air family diners), spas, and more. You pass a clothing outlet where a man shouts rapid-fire discounts into a microphone: “Two shirts—ten thousand colones, three—for even less…” Across the street, a woman yells at the top of her lungs, “Shut the hell up! Be quiet!” The announcer only gets louder until a war of bargains and threats has erupted, with people chuckling into their sleeves. You finally understand what noise pollution means.

At six in the evening, while you read at your desk, frogs croak a clear rhythm, occasionally overlapping in a complex melody. The house vibrates with their calls, as if they emanate from the walls. They blend with the chirps of crickets and the sound of your neighbor watching a movie with Spanish dubbing.

By eight, after eating dinner, you pet the purring cat who strangely loves being patted on the butt, leaving the other cat sulking in jealousy, her head peeking from the shadowy corner, her eyes glowing with malice.

At five in the morning, the songbirds wake you, though at that hour and in your sleep-cottony brain, they sound more like squeaky doors opening and closing repeatedly. You glance out the window and spot flashes of yellow and red congregating. In the distance, your neighbor’s young rooster attempts its morning call, sounding more like a goose with a cold. You lie back down, listening to the onslaught of tweets and squawks until your alarm goes off, a small smile creeping across your face.

At seven, as you’re getting ready for the day, you hear a sharp sound from your open window. Click… You assume it’s just an acorn bouncing off the neighbor’s house. Click-click-click! You move toward the window and see a tiny head peeking over the sill. Slowly, the cat’s body slips through the gap in the open window. With a wiggle and a snap, she frees herself from her glass prison, flicking her tail triumphantly. She leaps onto the bed and bolts to the door, pawing at it with a quick glance back at you. You open the door and she disappears in the blink of an eye.

By eight, you’re waiting at the bus stop near your house, painfully aware of how strange you look chuckling to yourself about the kitten. A mix of motorcycles, dented trucks, and electric cars roar or hiss silently past as schoolkids yell and chase one another. From the left comes a deep rumble that grows and grows until a red bus finally appears ten minutes late. After handing your coins to the driver, you sit in the midst of a storm of diversity: babies sleeping (but not for long), elderly women with shopping bags greeting long-lost friends with besitas on each cheek, kids no older than eight alone on their way to school, and countless teens and adults glued to their screens (like me right now, writing on my phone). All these sounds bloom and wither together, set against the backdrop of the rumbling bus like the curtains closing at the play’s end.

It’s not the delicious empanadas de queso or freshly harvested vegetables, nor the gingery scent of awapuhi that grows along the paths that connect the houses, nor the sight of the blue-tinged mountains in the distance, rather the sounds—rising and falling, waning and waxing—day after day, that remind you you’re in Costa Rica. They fascinate you, they honor you, they teach you; above all, they make you proud to be here, because you know that, one day, you’ll join them.