The Country I Learned to Ask Permission From

The Country I Learned to Ask Permission From

I decided to go to Costa Rica on a Tuesday when the room smelled like rain that hadn't arrived yet and my hands wouldn't stop shaking. Not from fear—from the opposite. From the terrible, quiet realization that I had been living like someone waiting for permission to want things, and that no one was coming to give it to me. So I opened my laptop with the kind of tenderness you use when touching something that might break you, and I typed the name of a country I had never been brave enough to say out loud.

Planning felt like learning to breathe in a new direction. Not the frantic kind of planning that tries to cage every hour, but the kind that makes space—for mistakes, for weather, for the moment when you realize you've been pronouncing "gracias" wrong for three days and no one corrected you because kindness is also a language. I sat with a notebook that had coffee stains on the cover and a pencil that I'd chewed when I was nervous, and I promised myself that this trip would not be about conquest. It would be about learning how to arrive somewhere without apologizing for taking up space.

I had forty dollars a day and a credit card I was afraid to use. Budget travel in Costa Rica in 2026 means hostels where the walls are thin enough to hear other people's dreams, buses that leave when they're ready and not when the schedule says, meals at sodas where rice and beans become a kind of meditation if you let them. I wrote down the numbers like they were a spell that could keep me safe: $50 USD per day if I cooked most meals and slept in dorm beds, $35 if I was willing to skip the tours and let hiking be my only entertainment. I folded the budget into my back pocket like a love letter to my future self, the one who would stand at a bus station in Jacó trying to decide if she could afford to be hungry or just needed to be humble.

Research was my way of controlling what I couldn't control, which is to say it was my way of pretending I wasn't terrified. I read about culture shock and how it arrives not as a single blow but as a series of small bewilderments—how to ask for a bathroom without sounding like you're demanding one, how to wait for a bus that might not come, how to accept help from a stranger without turning it into a transaction that leaves you feeling like you owe the world an apology. I learned to avoid arriving at night because new cities in the dark feel like walking into a room where everyone knows the punchline except you.

I studied the calendar like it was a test I hadn't prepared for. Dry season from December to April when the skies behave and the prices don't, green season when rain performs its daily ritual and everything exhales color and the tourists go home and the rooms get cheaper and you can finally hear yourself think. I chose green season not because I was brave but because my bank account made the decision for me, and I learned to call that pragmatism instead of failure.

The currency is the colón, and I practiced saying it until it stopped feeling like a word I was borrowing. I read that ATMs would give me colones without the theater of haggling, that I should keep small bills for buses and fruit stands and the neighborhood sodas where lunch tastes like someone's abuela decided you looked too thin. I folded the bills with the same care I used to fold my mother's letters, because money is also a way of saying I see you, I respect the work you did, I will not make you scramble for change while a line forms behind me.

Mindful travel, they call it now. As if there's any other kind worth doing. As if showing up to a country and demanding it perform for you isn't just tourism dressed as violence. I read about respecting the environment, supporting local communities, packing reef-safe sunscreen so that the ocean doesn't have to digest my carelessness. I read about replacing consumerism with authentic exploration, which is a fancy way of saying: stop buying shit you don't need to prove you were here.

I made lists because lists are the only thing that keep my brain from eating itself. Passport. Copies of the important pages. The small card with my blood type and the name of the person to call if I don't come home. The addresses of hostels I might stay at, written in handwriting that got smaller as my anxiety grew. Clothes that dry fast because laundry is a luxury and I would be hand-washing in sinks at 11 PM while other travelers snored through my quiet crisis. An umbrella that could survive wind. A water bottle I could refill so I wouldn't contribute to the mountain of plastic that makes environmentalists weep.

And then the other list, the one that mattered more: buenos días, con permiso, por favor, muchas gracias. I practiced them in the shower until the words stopped catching in my throat like apologies. I practiced them because language is the first way you tell a place whether you came to take or to listen.

I planned my routes the way you plan an escape: buses that cost $5-15 a day and would take me through cattle country and sudden views that arrive without asking permission. Shuttles that cost more but were faster and didn't require me to decode schedules written in a optimism I didn't yet possess. I read about la maría, the taxi meter, and how if a driver says it's broken you should smile and choose another car because some lessons are expensive and some are just annoying.

Solo travel anxiety is normal, they say, as if naming it makes it smaller. As if knowing that other people have stood in a foreign bus station at dawn feeling like an imposter makes your hands stop shaking. I learned the practical steps: figure out transportation first so the city stops feeling like a maze designed to humiliate you. Take a walk. Take a bus. Do something you'd do at home—find a café, buy fruit, sit in a plaza and let the rhythm of a place teach you its heartbeat.

I told myself that bad experiences are just stories I haven't told yet. That fear is often not based on fact but on the voice in my head that has been trying to keep me small since I was too young to argue back. I told myself to be the listener, not the voice. To breathe. To get out there and let the country teach me what planning could never hold.

On the night before I left, I stacked everything by the door: the notebook, the passport, the small bag of folded colones that would sing in a bus driver's hand. I lay in bed and listened to the life I was leaving hum in the walls—the dishwasher, the neighbor's television, the sound of a world that knew exactly what I was supposed to do next. And then I closed my eyes and listened harder, and I heard a second song: the one that was waiting for me to stop asking permission and just go.

When the plane lifted, I pressed two fingers to the window like I was saying goodbye to the version of me who thought she needed to earn the right to want things. Costa Rica was ahead—green, warm, impossible, and mine.

The plan, finally, was simple: arrive slowly, ask gently, pay fairly, let the rain teach me, and stop pretending that being scared means I'm doing it wrong.