Technology is Everywhere (a.k.a A Quiet Corner)

This post has nothing to do with technology.

A foreign country with beautiful people. A quite corner in a bar. Tables and shelves made from old wood that could have been doors or ship boards or a fence. A guy singing. Others scattered in the room, also singing. Work may bring you there, but you don’t bring work to a place like this.

I spent the night sitting on a stool made from an old something or other, sitting across a bald guy with earrings, who smiled a lot and loved to sing along. The extent of our conversation consisted of me nodding to his glass and him turning Jim Bean into a Spanish word.

People sing along in Costa Rica. The all seem to carry a tune just fine.

In another place, the young couples sitting at the table near me would have been loud and obnoxious as they ordered dos Tequilas again and again. dos Tequilas is clearly a universal phrase. Obnoxiously lining up shot glasses as you pound down Tequila is not.

The candles on the tables were lodged in the cracks of the worn wood table tops. This worked well enough, after all, the candles just need to stay up right. Wood is wood and it lasts a long time. It looked like this use was not about recycling or atmosphere, but more just practicality. New is not always better.

The woman behind the counter tracked drinks on a notebook in between doodles. The date was the only thing that separated one day from the next. The register was a door, the bar a shelf, the fridge something borrowed from a convenience store. I tried to see where this young girl was writing down my Imperiales on her pad but could not.

Imperial tastes to me like a cool beer after a Sunday morning soccer game. Refreshing like you wouldn’t believe.

There looked to be a TV at the end of the bar. Turns out, it was an old 15 inch monitor which displayed a skinned MP3 player of some kind. This answered the mystery of how the songs were playing in between sets of the guitar player. Would an artist care about getting 99 cents for a song if it was played in this place? Maybe.

I smoked a cigar with the bald guy. Found out later he was the owner.

I kept thinking you would never find a place like this on your own. If you peered in the door, without someone who was from there, you’d wonder if they welcomed strangers. Maybe you’d go in or move on down the line to a bar playing house music filled with more people who clearly looked from different places.