My name is beautiful

Current location: Heredia, Costa Rica

He couldn’t possibly have known that by loudly calling out “beautiful” in Spanish when I passed him on the street, he was actually calling me by my right name. Sometimes I wonder if my parents were aware of the troubles that my name would cause me on this side of the world. My name is Linda, which literally means beautiful in Spanish. Adorable, yes I know, but it attracts unwanted attention, which added upon the already established attention of being blond and blue-eyed creates an attention bomb I could do without. For this reason I am now trying to live my childhood dream; calling myself by my middle name rather than by my given name. However, switching names is not as easy as I thought it would be. It turns out that answering the question “what is your name?” with a name that is not your name is hard. I find myself being confused by the question, and those that ask find me a little strange for not being able to answer what my name is. It goes something like: I am Llllii…. Uhm… Eh. Evelina?”. I’ve been called out on my strange behavior twice now. I blame it on my language barrier. Other than trying (and somewhat failing) to change my name, I am starting to settle in. The first couple of weeks in Costa Rica were terrifying; mostly due to perceived hostility and the “I-want-to-rape-and-stab-you-to-death-afterwards-vibes” I experienced walking alone on the street after dark. Now that I have learned that the people calling out things on the street are simply harmless assholes I feel a lot better in my pineapple filled world. That’s right. They have a lot of pineapples here, and I eat it for breakfast every day!

#costarica #cultureclash #impressions