Superstitions are always kind of funny in general, but there’s one in particular that you’ll run into in Costa Rica that the people TAKE VERY SERIOUSLY.

In fact, I probably learned about this superstition my very first day in the country, back when I was nineteen years old and in college (a thousand years ago, now—or to be more precise, almost twenty) and there I was lugging a giant suitcase off the bus and through the streets of Quepos, which happen to have raised sidewalks—which meant I’d have to lug the thing up three steps, walk down the block, then down three steps and cross a street, then up three steps, walk down the block, and down three steps, etc. I’ll never forget what I was wearing: a straw hat with a hot pink flower on top, and MATCHING HOT PINK KITTEN HEELS. Oh yes, I did. I had no idea where I was going (ahem, a rainforest), and no idea that I looked ridiculous (ahem, I did). But hey, can you blame a nineteen-year-old for trying? :)

In addition to my luggage the size and weight of an actual dead body, I also carried a big satchel from Target on one shoulder—you know, with my diary and stuff. As one does.

Eventually when I got to my final destination—a host family’s home in the village of Boca Vieja—I was exhausted from all this lugging. So the very first thing I did upon entering—after realizing THAT, HOLY SMOKES, I WAS IN CENTRAL AMERICA—was drop the satchel from my arm so I could greet everyone properly.

And that’s when the yelling started.

“Ahí no!” she yelled from across the room. I thought she meant me, as if I shouldn’t stand on that precise square meter of floor, but upon closer inspection I saw that she was actually pointing at my satchel. “Never put your purse on the floor,” she tsked. “You’ll lose all your money!”

She was not kidding. Nor is any other Costa Rican when they scold you for putting your purse on the floor. They mean business. It’s an age-old superstition and I just dare you to place your purse on any floor publicly: within moments you’ll have at least one stranger approach and tell you to pick your purse up off the floor. :)

Though I’ll say this: you want to know the real reason I don’t put my purse on the floor anymore? It has nothing to do with superstitions and everything to do with COCKROACHES. 🤣 Not because you see them everywhere—thank god—but because giant ones do exist in the jungle and I’m personally terrified that one day this will actually happen to me and I’ll open my purse and a giant one will crawl out onto my hand and I will scream and cry and have a mental breakdown and life will never be the same and I’ll never be able to carry a purse again. So the fear of that alone keeps me from putting my purse on the ground—that and the fact that when I lived in Chile, you never do that because of petty thievery.

So basically what I’m saying is that if you get here and you see this crazy American girl clutching onto her satchel like her life depended on it, her shoulder full of knots and her spinal alignment totally out of whack…definitely stop and say hi. It’s probably me. 🤷