Australians Invade Costa Rica|B. A. Mullin|Fiction
Australians Invade Costa Rica
I had just turned nineteen and had been living in Heredía, Costa Rica for the past three months to learn Spanish and volunteer for extra credit on the side. A regular term for most people was three months. I decided to stay for six months to get my foreign language courses taken care of, which also meant everyone I knew was going home before me. Even my schoolmates, Muza and Secuna, who traveled there with me from Texas, went back to our electrical engineering school. Lunch breaks and weekends would be uncomfortably quiet now, and I would be in Heredía for a long while without a friend in all of Central America.
With everyone gone and nothing to do with my spare time, I took up salsa lessons. I couldn’t get the nerve to go to a club and ask a lady to dance. The last thing I wanted was to put a nice girl on the spot and freak her out as I klutz around what little moves I learned in a few lessons. My biggest concern was stepping on her feet; I was shy with women already. With the pressure of being alone in a foreign land, it was even harder to ask anyone anything. So I filled my time with practice and more practice at the dance studio. Three long weeks went by, I went to class, got some volunteer work done, and did my salsa steps with a German group that didn’t know any English. We communicated in Spanish. Then I’d go directly to my tico home to study more language skills.
When I returned on a Friday, my tica mom surprised me during dinner. Two new travelers arrived and they’d be bunking in the room next to me. They were from Australia and would be in town for a week to get a few Spanish lessons in and volunteer. They would be going to my school with a bunch of others who they kept naming off.
My new roommates needed someone to show them the ropes of Heredía. I was happy to oblige. “It’s easy here. There’s a big church in the center of town. You can see its tip from anywhere in the city. Makes for a good meeting place if you get separated from a group, or just need a landmark when you’re lost. There’s a park attached to it, not to be confused with the smaller one on the eastern part of town, or the one on the western side. Those two don’t have a church. Nosotros Universidad es dos bloques sur de la Parque de Central.” Yeah, I was being a showoff.
They looked confused. Maybe all my words were wrong? “I’ll give y’all a tour in the morning of the park from the school. You can walk this city in fifteen minutes, so it won’t take long to know what I’m talking about.”
“Are there any museums?” Lucas asked. The lights above the dinner table revealed his orange freckles.
“One beside the post office next to Parq—Central Park. It’s pretty cool. There are these concrete art pieces on the outside with holes in them. Before they abolished the military here, their troops used the actual art sculptures to hide behind and would shoot at invaders from the holes.” At least that’s what I think the guide said.
“My Spanish is only at an intermediate level. I came here not knowing how to say the word ‘no.’” They laughed with me. “It gets easier.”
I had to sip a lot of water after all that talking. My voice hadn’t felt dry like that since Muza and Secuna got me to rant about politics in engineering.
“I thought all Texans spoke like cowboys,” William, the muscular one with a shaved head said.
“I’m from Austin, it’s a big city with a lot of rock ‘n’ roll.”
“You like rock ‘n’ roll?” Lucas asked me while showing an air guitar.
“Who doesn’t?” William answered for me and nudged my shoulder with his elbow.
“Must be a coincidence,” I changed the subject. “The other day I was speaking in Spanish to this cab driver. He asked if I was from Australia. I told him I’d never even met an Australian. Now, here I sit with two.”
“Why would he think you were from Australia?” Lucas unwrapped some of the green tamale leaves our tica mom set down on plates. He picked at his food.
“Random. I think he was just trying to say politely that my Spanish accent needed work.”
“Random’s right though,” Lucas said.
“Yeh.” William smoothed over his five-o’clock shadow with a palm. “Hey, since you’re already being mistaken for one of us, how about you join us tomorrow for Australia Day?”
“What’s that? I mean the history.”
“It would take a while to cover. But in summary, we celebrate unity and convict ships that came over from Great Britain. Sydney stuff. Unity. Fireworks. Drinking. The usual.” Lucas and William laughed more.
“Funny. The States celebrate how we got away from Great Britain on Independence Day.”
“We’re well aware. I’ve always found that hilarious,” said Lucas.
“We get drunk. The rest doesn’t matter.” William high-fived Lucas. “So, you joining us?”
And in a blink, I had friends again. Australia Day came that Saturday. William, Lucas, and I hit the town. We ended up at a McDonalds and waited for their traveling companions to arrive. They kept calling the place “Maccas,” and insisted on checking in there.
“Uh, uh, Lucas. You can have Maccas delivered to your doorstep here.” William pointed to a picture of a deliveryman presenting a Big Mac to someone.
Lucas had his head to his phone. “Really?”
My new friends didn’t speak Spanish yet, so I had to do the talking even though my version of the language was mediocre at best. I managed to get us a table and order food through broken sentences and a lot of potentially inappropriate hand gestures.
After we ate, over twenty Australians walked up to our table brimming with grins. William knew all of their names. Lucas hugged a few of his mates. The two gave me a spectacle of an introduction. “This is Scott Terrier from Austin. He loves to rock ‘n’ roll, and is unofficially Australian now.” It took me a while to shake all of their hands. I didn’t remember each name I heard but it was an interesting challenge to get their names down. It reminded me of coding, so I tried.
We walked across the town, through Central Park, and to a bar with a booth big enough to seat the whole bunch. “I’ve got Scott’s first drink,” William said.
One of the girls, the one with the brightest blue eyes whose name escaped me, said “I got his second then.” She sat across from me and presented a hand. “Name’s Em.” Em read my facial expression like words on pages. “I know it’s hard. There’s a lot of us.”
Her hand was freezing. “They say a cold hand means a warm heart.”
“It’s just the beer bottle.” Em rubbed the condensation, batted her lashes, and showed her pearly whites.
We drank some beer, then we drank some more. In the States, the drinking age was twenty-one. It was so cool that I could drink legally in this country on my off time. Hopefully, my parents would never know.
Em took a picture of William, Lucas, and me taking a sip from our beers. “This is going straight online.” At least I had a little fun before my dad killed me. Em pretended to sit on my lap and took a picture of the both of us. Her perfume overwhelmed the air and I was temporarily out of breath from her. The alcohol was clearly getting to me. I started asking ridiculous questions. “Hey, if it’s down under in Australia, is everywhere else up over?”
Em smirked,“No.”
“Do y’all have a national anthem?”
Chloe, who was pretty tall even sitting down, answered, “Yeh, Advance Australia Fair. But nobody knows all the words.”
“Why not? In Texas, we say ours before every baseball game and in almost all large events. I don’t recall a rodeo day without hearing it. Not that I’ve been to all of them, but still everyone knows ours by heart because society force-feeds it to us. Australia doesn’t do that?”
“No. Not really.” William finished his beer.
The girl with the red bow in her hair, on the far end of the table said, “But with the twenty-five of us here, we can recite the parts we know and sing it all eventually.” The others raised their glasses to a cheers motion. I was glad they were drunk too.
Every one of them started off with the bit they knew. A few began and stopped where others picked up. Only one of the guys with round glasses, said the whole anthem. I applauded their vigor and high-fived Lucas, William, Em and all the Aussies I could reach.
“Amazing.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said. “Do you have any other questions? This is fun.” Some “yehs” were echoed from across our long booth. The challenge was there. I had to think of more questions. “Okay. What are some Australian curse words?”
A lean guy about my age played with his dark curly hair, “The same ones you have, probably.” He went on to say a few I knew and some I hadn’t heard. Everyone laughed as he listed them all off from A-to-Z.
“So, is bloody a curse word in Australia?”
“We say bloody like one, sure. Does it sound like a curse word?” William asked back. Lucas added, “It just replaces the f-bomb.”
“You mean f—?” Em nearly said it when another girl grabbed her mouth.
“Manners!”
Em ended up singing an Australian song about manners. Everyone at the table sang along. Em sat down next to me until we left. The lean guy clapped as the whole lot of us walked through Central Park in a gigantic pack. We looked like a bunch of drunken tourists as we hobbled down a few blocks and into an empty salsa club.
There was a dance floor inside, but no one started dancing right away. Then ten of the guys and two of the girls began. Some of the men danced together jokingly. Soon, everyone around me stood up from their chairs and went to join the fun. Right then, sitting there, I felt alone again. The darkness of the club consumed me. If I had been sober, tears wouldn’t have been welling in my eyes. I just met these people. If I asked one of the girls to dance and stepped on her little toes, I would lose the only friends I had in all of Central America.
“Care to dance with me?” Em lowered her hand toward mine. “I’ll warn you first and foremost that your feet are in a lot of danger. I assure you the rest of you is safe.” She hiccupped a bit of drunkenness out. “Well that’s not entirely true. Your shins are certainly at risk of some injury, and I’ll probably, accidentally, end up kneeing you in your…” She kept on babbling, so I took her hand to get her to stop naming random anatomy parts. We faced each other, and both smiled awkwardly. Her hips pressed against mine. Her perfume did its work on my breath. Her auburn bangs reached for me and right then, the prettiest girl from down under proceeded to belch in my face.
We had a lot of fun invading Costa Rica together.
Photo by Ashly Araya on Unsplash
Bio:
B. A. Mullin, or BAM has works in dozens of anthologies, journals, and magazines. Write Out Publishing released his first standalone mini novel, “Bar Buds.” HellBound Books has “Zeitgeist” in their Shopping List Anthology. “Tsunami” is featured with BellaOnline Literary Journal. His manuscript, Diaries of Karma, won the WildSound Competition in 2015. BAM teaches kids English in Japan and is a Ph.D student in applied linguistics at Temple University in Osaka. He’s also the chief editor and compiler of 42 Stories Anthology. Social media: bamwrites.com, facebook.com/bamwrites, instagram.com/bam_writesand twitter.com/bamwrites
