So, dear readers ... Where were we?

So, dear readers ... Where were we?

Ah yes: that I was born on January 16th, 1981 and 26 years later, on Thursday September 13th, 2007, a guy on a motorcycle, who didn't want to follow a stop sign around 1 p.m., at the intersection between Uruca street and Pavas main avenue, located in the west part of the city of San Jose (or, as we would give the address in Costa Rica, “at the corner located 100 meters east from the Pollo Cervecero Bar and Grill) changed my life. I never got the chance to know him. I don't even know his name. Moreover, I was not even there when all this happened: at that moment I was sitting in my office, just on the other side of the capital, working and trying to digest a lasagna that I had eaten for lunch .

This was an example of what is known as a butterfly effect. And sometimes it happens that it's not even you the one who puts its wings to move.

Anyway, since then I have had 13 jobs, including jobs as random as answering phones in call centers, drive a truck, do gardening in a nudist camp, ask for money on the street, take care of 60 orphaned children in a boarding school, demolish houses, clean hostels and as a journalist, of course, which in theory is my profession. I have also lived in six houses, hostels or apartments in four different countries on three continents, and have traveled to 37 countries. As you can see, then,back on that day, what that guy hit with his motorcycle was my stability. Since then, my life is a mess.

A couple of years later, on a rainy afternoon in the city of San Jose, watching some Man Ray's movies and smoking a hookah with a friend in his apartment's living room, I found a book about Dada. This artistic movement, originated in the early twentieth century in Switzerland, proposed the random, the unstructured and the casual as an art form. For example, a poem could be cut out words from newspapers, put them in a bag, and then shake them out like crazy only to paste them afterwards in a random order. The movement's name, of course, also had to be random. Its founders, who used to meet at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, opened a French dictionary and the first word that jumped off the pages gave name to the movement: Dada. A horse that swings for playful and childish fun. A rocking horse.

At that moment, I had an epiphany: my life was precisely that. A plastic bag full with unexpected events. No fixed targets, no long periods terms, no stability. A collage of unrelated facts together. And while all this happens, I am riding on a rocking horse, without getting anywhere really, just for fun, just for enjoy the time.

Tristan Tzara's grave, founder of Dadaism. Paris. 

With this in mind, in 2011 I launched my first blog, On the rocking horse (Sobre el caballito de madera, sorry, available only in Spanish) with the goal of keeping my friends updated about my adventures in Europe. At the end, since I was unable to keep a travel diary, the blog morphed through a lot of thoughts, photos, stories, opinion articles and it fluctuated according to my mood and how tired I was to write. Well, with the mess that my life is, I could not expect anything else.

Nearly a year later, when I returned to Costa Rica, I sat with all the notes I had in my laptop and I wrote a novel, which I sent to a travel literature award in Valencia, Spain.

One afternoon, while I was at work and I was about to go happily to the bathroom after eating a cassava pie, just as I was walking away from my desk, toothbrush in hand, my cell phone rang and I received the news that On the rocking horse, the novel, was awarded with the International Award for Travel Literature of the City of Benicassim 2012. After I dropped the toothbrush and I fell down to the floor afterwards, and after the whole building heard me screaming of joy, and after huging anyone who dared to come into my office, and after jumping across the halls, I realized I could be a writer.

The award allowed me to take my mom to Europe, one of my biggest dreams, and according to me, as well it would allow me to begin my journey to Asia, in order to write the story's second part: On the bamboo horse (thanks Shirley Malespín, for suggesting the name).

However, two things happened that I did not consider. The first is that one thing is traveling alone and another one traveling with a mother. Given the circumstances, I had to raise my quality standards for backpacking, such as eating three times per day something more than bread from the supermarket; sleeping in hotel rooms and not doing couchsurfing, camping, or simply crashing at a train station; taking planes, trains or buses fully prepaid and without sneaking into the wagons without a ticket, or hitchhiking depending only on my thumb to reach my destination. In other words, I spent a lot of money, but I will NEVER regret it: it is priceless to see your mother admired with the Eiffel Tower, to see her crying of happiness at Saint Peter's Square, or to sit with her and smoke a join at a coffee shop in Amsterdam.

With my mom in Paris. At least one dream deserves to come true.

The second thing that went wrong was that I got a job in Portugal, in a hostel, which at the end it didn't turn out to be what I expected. You know, the famous economic crisis…

So we arrive to this moment, when I am in Europe with just a few bucks left and no job. Under these circumstances the most reasonable thing would be to go back to my country with the tail between my legs and start from the scratch, activity in which I have a really extensive experience. But I refuse to do that. I already crossed the ocean and I am going to Asia. If making your dreams come true was easy, everyone would do it and we would live in heaven.

I had thought about not writing any other blog for a while until I would be ready to start with On the bamboo horse, in order to focus on other writing projects that I have going. My idea is to finish them as soon as possible and then settle down in front of a publisher in Spain, in strict hunger strike until someone deigns to read my drafts.

However, very soon I realized that I choked myself with many unwritten words. I needed to share what I was living. There is a lot to laugh about, a lot to cry about, a lot to write about.

Besides, I also began to think that if I really want to be a writer, I should start acting like one. I should start to believe in myself and in what I write. And this is my work actually, not only cleaning floors, babysitting or opening the door to german backpackers in a hostel at two o'clock in the morning.

So here I am. This blog tells the story of how I try to be a writer on this side of the world, where I am alone. I've never been so lonely in my whole life. This is, then, the window through which I cry.

What results from all this remains to be seen. And if it's good, I guess at some point I will end up looking for that guy who simply ignore a stop sign on Thursday September 13th, 2007, around 1 p.m., at the junction between Uruca street and the main avenue in Pavas (or, as we would give the address in Costa Rica, at the corner 100 meters east from the Pollo Cervecero Bar and Grill) to thank him for changing my life, although initially I wanted to kill him, literally.

You never know: life can take so many turns …

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