I took my first steps toward home before Christmas when I went to San José, Costa Rica, to meet my brother, and again when I saw him off three weeks later.

The centre of San José looks like an American city, and everyone is wearing “acido-wash” something. I heard a choir singing Christmas carols on December 19 in the Plaza de la Cultura. They looked and sounded so much like choirs I’ve been in that they put me in the Christmas spirit.

The citizens of San José have a custom of walking up and down Central Avenue in the evenings before Christmas, throwing confetti at each other and flicking paper spirals in people’s faces. The overall effect is of a snowstorm, and I had to brush myself off before going into the hotel, which made me feel right at home.

My brother and I returned to San José days before the summit of the five Central American presidents there on January 15th. Right-wing groups in Costa Rica were conducting a hate campaign in the newspapers against Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. Ads headlined “Ortega out!”, “Wanted, the Dictator Ortega!” were filled with statements that Ortega was procuring prostitutes for Russian and Cuban diplomats. This was only a little more extreme than what appears every day in the Costa Rican press about Nicaragua, and on par with a weekly supplement, Nicaragua Today, that depicts that country more or less as a concentration camp.

It is possible to buy the pro-Sandinista Nicaraguan newspapers on the street in San José, but most Costa Ricans get only this vitriol.

The night before I re-entered Nicaragua, I was talking about these crazy lies I had been reading in the Costa Rican press to the hotel owner, when he declared himself to be a member of Costa Rica Libre, an anti-Sandinista organization affiliated to the World Anti-Communist League (which in pre-Reagan days was a fringe group). I felt like galloping back across the border.

It wasn’t only the anti-communism, but also the commercialism I felt chasing me. Costa Rican prices are close to American prices, which leaves the minimum-waged, on a few dollars a day, unable to enjoy the availability of goods.

It was a quick dose of culture shock to inoculate me for the trip home.

Hitch-hiking to Managua, my spirits were improved when I learned that my ride was hauling a container of rice donated by Argentina.