I went to ‘El Museo de Jade’ today, the Jade Museum. Kessler and I are here in San José because she is taking the AP English exam on Wednesday and the SAT exam on Saturday. She did half of AP English in Blue Hill and the other half online. It’s a four hour bus ride to the exam center so we came up from the coast the night before. You have to hand it to her. She (and Kim) really stuck with this when others said it could not be done, to complete AP English with 2 different instructors, one at home, the other on-line, while outside of the United States. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The museum has fantastic jade ornaments, decorative jade axe heads, and animal figurines, all pre-Columbian. But the place would be more accurately named “The Museum of Pre-Columbian Art” because jade was only a portion of it. There were wonderful stone carvings, decorative pottery, gold amulets and more. Some of it was practical everyday household stuff like pre-Columbian ice cream scoops, but all the rest seemed to reflect a keen knack for artistic expression. Many artifacts were spooky in a Hieronymous Bosch sort of way: Human body parts and animal body parts comingled into fantastic nightmarish creatures. Take a look at the inside cover of the Allman Brothers’ “Eat A Peach” and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Which gets you thinking about commonalities in artistic expression between utterly disparate cultures (Bosch, Costa Rica, Allman Brothers). And it also gets you thinking about magic.

Nowadays magic is tricks, special effects, a billion dollar business in the form of Harry Potter, or quaint superstition. But before science, I am guessing that magic was a commonsense and commonplace aspect of daily life. In that sense it would not be “magic” as we use the word but rather reality in a way we would not recognize. I am thinking that the bizarre and distorted renderings in that museum are not the result of immature expression or talent gone astray, but rather they are faithful representations of the world as those people saw it. This raises the matter of “cultural vision,” a term I just invented, and have no idea what it means.

Well, after all that I was ready for a bite to eat. It was raining in San José - blessed is the rain - so I ducked into a little café. Out of ten places on that street I’ll bet you would have picked the same one. Why? It had character. Chelle’s has dark wood paneling, an ornate if dinged-up bar, small tables nicely set but not fancy. Being on the corner, there were two large open doors by which to view passersby. That was the real attraction. Chelle’s had something of an American diner about it, and something regally Spanish too. It might have been the possessive apostrophe, which does not exist in Spanish, or the wine glasses on display, which do.

It was two in the afternoon, an ambiguous hour for a meal. I ordered Sopa Negra, Black Soup. And a glass of red wine. I had no idea what Sopa Negra was but I imagined it to be some sort of black bean soup that might come with crackers or bread. Another reason I chose soup is that I thought it would be quick. The rain was letting up and I saw a window for getting back to the hotel.

Well, the soup wasn’t quick. The minute hand on the electric wall clock worked its way around to quarter past two before the wine came. About half past the hour a matronly waitress bearing a colossal bowl came steaming around the bend like Dewey’s flagship at the Battle of Manila. With a ceremonial air and a knowing smile she uttered “Buen Provecho” and adopted a reciprocal course. I peered into the bowl. What could be down there that took so long?

The broth was dark brown, like you’d expect of a black bean soup. I plumbed the depths, like you do, just to see if you got a good count. There were no beans. Instead, a flourish of my spoon brought to light a whitish-grey, diaphanous membrane that fluttered on the surface like summer curtains, and sank back into the mire. “Well” thought I, “maybe that’s the good part!”

The soup was hot so I gave it a rest. I was watching passersby. I was sipping wine. My thoughts were spanning continents and centuries. But in the back of it all was a question about that whitish-grey stuff. My next probe revealed an ovaloid, about the size and shape of a testicle.  

Now, I count myself an adventurous eater. I’ve been all over. Seldom, if ever, have I stepped back from the chance to eat something weird. I could turn your stomach describing food that has gone down my hatch. But there are some culinary paths that you simply don’t want to travel without, how do you say, foreknowledge?

I thought of the waitress’s smile and that cackle from behind the bar. There was no denying it: I had just ordered something in a foreign country and I had no idea what it was. Serves you right, Mr. World Traveler. Captain World Traveler to you! I concluded that the best course of action was to sip down the broth until I had more, how do you say? Data? Yes, more data as to what was lurking in that black lagoon.  

In the fullness of time two testicular ovaloids – there were precisely two of them – were wallowing in the bilge of my lunch. I couldn’t put it off any longer. Hoping not to scream like a school girl and run out of the place, I made an incision into the nearer of the two. A rich orange interior was revealed. They were eggs. So I ate them. At least I think they were eggs.