Rain brings Peeping-Toms and medical tourists together
Posted to personal blog on May 24, 2012
Yes, yes. I am a Wyoming girl. One who loves her Prickly Pear and sagebrush, an antelope’s dust trail billowing from beneath his racing limbs, and the rough canter of a mule.
My current residence in Costa Rica’s capital has me far from this world. Here constant downpours keep even the concrete city center a brilliant, humid green. The green is in the palm and avocado trees, the surrounding mountains and the moss growing from the underarms of statues. This liquid from the sky will take some adjusting to for a Big Horn Basin dweller. Such an environment promotes some unique, tropical critters to live within this city of a million people. They appear as I’m showering off the sweat and smog from the day.
Photo by Gabriel Dinsmoor
A lip-smacking sound echoes around the stall as I’m lathering up, sounding like the kissing cat-calls of a Latino on the street. A reaction twitches through me to cover up. But my only observer is the bug-eyed smile of a gecko in the bathroom corner. I flick water at him but he only scoots farther up the wall and continues his surveillance. Pura vida Costa Rica.
After washing the city off me, I wander to the hostel’s communal kitchen to continue a conversation with a couple residing in my hostel for the next three weeks. The pair is in their 60s and they are in San Jose as medical tourists. Both are having dental work done. Between them there are more than a dozen crowns being put on their teeth and they say the procedures cost half of what they would in the States. So they thought, why not make a vacation out of it?
Chatting with co-workers at the Tico Times, this is isn’t an unusual practice. Especially for dental work, most doctors are trained in the U.S. and Canada. The Tico Times wrote that medical tourism brings in approximately $100 million to Costa Rica a year, according to the Council for International Promotion of Costa Rica Medicine. The pricing for medical services is often 50 to 70 percent less than comparable care in the U.S.
I am a pricy child, my parents would have saved a few grand if I got my braces and new ACL here in the tropics. Children’s braces here reportedly cost $1,000. What did you pay, Mom and Dad, $4,000 for mine? Another reporter tells me I could get a boob job for a mere $3,000. With this deal I’d have twenty geckos doing the Peeping Tom.
