Pura Vida! Or pure life is a common saying I heard over and over again on my trip to Costa Rica. As a young professional chasing dollars, I’ve been recently inspired to do more traveling outside of my comfort countries and explore a place I have no business in. Somewhere to land more perspective instead of my daily grind that nets me more stress than I’d like to admit. Costa Rica with it’s lush rainforests, amazing beaches, and volcanos seemed like the place to be so with my passport in hand and my bags packed off I went.
As anyone who travels may know, the currency exchange at the airport can be quite convenient when traveling as you can arrive in the country and already have their native currency in hand. A thought process realized as I exchanged my US dollars for their colones. I always told my mother I’d be a millionaire but I didn’t tell her in dollars as I snapped a photo of the million colones I had in my hand. Exchange rate was $1- $575 colones. I was shocked. Never have I seen such a drastic difference in exchange rates before. This got me interested in understanding foreign currency as I walked over to a seat in the airport gate waiting for my departure. A couple of google searches lead to me realize exactly how the monetary currency system is so vastly outdated that I can’t imagine how the people all over the world even in Costa Rica (ranked top 10 happiest places on earth) were not involved as involved with crypto as their neighbors in Venezuela especially seeing how it’s been a great store of value for them in uncertain times.
You would think seeing what the money value can do for their neighbors they can do for themselves. This got me to thinking what is currency and what is money. Most will say they are the same thing(hopefully not in this community) and I thought to myself how misinformed we truly are as a society.
As I travel around and spend quite a few colones I find that paying out $23,000 colones for a dinner and couple of Jack Daniels didn’t make sense to me why there wasn’t an easier way.
The whole time fighting anxiety to pay not knowing or calculating the exchange rate I figured I’d be happier to have the waiter pull out a QR code and allow me to transfer via crypto which would of made this transaction a lot smoother.
All In all, the trip was a blast but what resonated with me the most wasn’t the toucans in the rainforest, the active volcano bursting clouds overhead, nor the 6.8 magnitude tremor I felt whilst eating that $33,000 colones dinner. No, what resonated with me is this silly thing we call paper money. We will eventually get to the point where all merchants will be accepting crypto as a form of payment and I doubt they’d ever look back.
Pura vida my friends!