Okay, so it’s been a little while since I’ve written anything. What’s up with that? Let me start at the beginning:

I felt the walls surrounding me quiver then begin to close in. I’d spent months preparing for just such an eventuality, and now all of that hard work was about to pay off. I kept my eyes closed tightly and didn’t breathe. Then, I felt cold upon the top of my head, it spread down toward my shoulders, and suddenly, strong hands were pulling me out into the chill air. With a start, I gasped for breath, and . . . wait, you didn’t need the story of my birth?

Okay, let’s get a little bit more recent.

It was winter break, and I was back at my parents’ house in San Francisco. I’d just been home for Thanksgiving, but that did little to diminish the feeling that I wanted to spend time with them and my two siblings since I didn’t see my family very often. Luckily for me, my birthday falls in early January, and it seemed like a perfect excuse to gather everyone together. Well, as it turned out, school was starting back up a little bit too soon, and I was going to have to fly back to L.A. the day before my birthday, but whatever. We were celebrating it, okay? Sheesh.

Anyhow, the point is my parents are kind of travel addicts, and as one of their children, that meant I was toted along to all sorts of exotic locales: Italy, France, Italy, Belgium, Italy, Thailand, Italy, Hong Kong, Italy, Brazil, Italy, even Kenya! And, of course, Italy. Look, they like Italy. Would you stop asking so many questions? I’m just trying to give you some context here.

The point I’m trying to make is that despite all of that traveling, I’d never really explored anywhere on my own. I mean, yeah, I’d flown by myself to go stay with friends or relatives, but I’d never had to manage a trip. Both of my parents had done so as vaguely-college-aged people and felt that it was an impactful experience worth having, so as a birthday gift, they gave me a trip to a Grand Prix of my choice and the surrounding country. After organizing my summer so that it allowed me to take a C++ programming course and work a couple of weeks at a summer camp (that’s definitely worth checking out if you have kids on the east coast), I had two choices, both falling on the weekend of September 15.

San Jose, Costa Rica, or Moscow, Russia.

Works Like a Charm

Frankly, I had no idea how to go about making the decision, so I read up on each of the cities and some of the touristy things to do nearby. For better or for worse, it all sounded cool, and the influx of information did very little to dissuade me from any option. So I took the easy way out, not that I’m proud of it. I can speak passable Spanish, but not a word of Russian; I’ve been in Latin America before and have some idea how things operate in that part of the world, but the northern reaches of the globe are completely alien to me; and I was pretty sure that GP: Costa Rica was going to have fewer competitors.

As a rule, I’m not much of a risk taker—more of a control freak, really, and that mentality has led me to keep doing the things that I already know I enjoy. It’s the driving force that’s driven me so deep into Magic; why try a secondary hobby that doesn’t sound very appealing when I can just spend more time brewing decks, looking further into casual circles, or figuring out how the game is designed? Not that I’m unhappy with where my Magic obsession has taken me, per se, but over the past year or so, I’ve been making conscious efforts to put myself in new situations. And this summer, it really solidified for me in the advice of a good friend and mentor: Push yourself into the unknown because otherwise, you’ll never know what you might be missing.

Serenity by Nikander

I chickened out, and I’m sure I won’t always succeed in leaving the comfortable behind—maybe not even ten percent of the time—but I’m sure as hell going to try. Even writing this down, I can feel familiar misgivings rising in my throat, but now it’s out there for all to see, and there’s nothing the safety-craving me can do about it.

Coasting Through

Eight hundred words later, we finally make it to the part where I actually go to another country—well, after this sentence anyway.

You still there? Good. So in an effort to keep things less predictable, here’s the plan I formulated for my three-week trip:

1. Make a list of interesting places to visit and find phone numbers for hostels in the area.
2. Book for the first couple of nights and during the Grand Prix ahead of time.
3. Don’t book anything else ahead of time.
4. Try to befriend people in country and explore with them.
5. Get back for the GP and win that—or at least Top 4 to qualify for the Pro Tour.
6. ???
7. Profit.

Spoiler Alert: I didn’t win GP: Costa Rica, but there are a couple of steps beforehand that need addressing. I’d be happy to share all of the minutia of my travel, but this piece is running long enough as is, so instead you’re seeing the highlight reel.

Breaking and Entering

As you may know if you’re in the habit of reading author blurbs, I’m studying physics, so when I ran across a Zambian physics postdoc at my hostel, in San Jose we got to talking. He was leaving the country in the morning and wanted to explore the city beforehand, and I said what the heck. So Bob and I wandered down to the city’s center, and right off the main plaza laid El Gran Hotel Costa Rica. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

I hadn’t done my homework, but apparently Bob had heard of the place, so I put on my best self-assured American tourist face, nodded at the security guard, and strode right in, Bob in tow. Nobody said a word.

We wandered up a staircase and poked around the hallways until we came to a room with pool tables and a bookshelf where we found an old Star Trek novel left behind by someone who forgot to return it to an Ohio library. Bob grabbed it for the plane ride, and we turned to leave, before I noticed a ladder sitting at the top of the stairs. Above, we found a cut-out section of wall, and it was awfully dark inside. I clambered up to find myself on a narrow section of floor between a hole in the ground and some sort of enormous stucco-covered cylinder—what I assumed to be a water tank. Then, Bob came up behind me, and we inched forward until the floor broadened in front of a doorway to some sort of office. Inside, we found an old computer with lights blinking feebly, the hotel’s server I guessed, and some sort of enormous engineering contraption with taught steel cables. I tell you: Hotel staff get all of the coolest perks.

Quaking in My Boots

It was 8:40 A.M., and I was fast asleep after a night of reading The Dresden Files and Return to Ravnica spoilers when I got the impression that somebody was shaking me awake—which was weird, since I was the only one in my hotel room. My eyes snapped open. It wasn’t someone shaking me so much as mother nature herself. I leapt out of bed, took one look at the rickety doorframe, and raced down the two flights of stairs to the open courtyard, drips from the jittering water tank above dribbling down my bare back. At the bottom, I could hear dogs barking and saw a bunch of hotel staff congregating outside of the main lounge area, a group of chairs under a tin roof. The lights that had been bolted to the ceiling swung wildly. And then it stopped, though I didn’t notice right away given how much I was trembling. The lamps continued to swing.

By the time I got dressed and brought all of my stuff downstairs, someone had turned on the TV, and the news stations were reporting it as a 7.6 on the Richter scale with an epicenter about forty miles south of Liberia, where I was staying. I switched to a sturdier-looking hotel that afternoon.

Not of this World

There are a lot of things in life that aren’t as they seem. In fact, life itself is not as it seems because there’s simply too much going on in the real world to wrap our brains around. Physics gives clear parameters for building up systems from their most basic components, but even our most advanced supercomputers are nowhere close to having enough processing power to model a single atom of Carbon exactly. Luckily, a close approximation will yield the correct answers in just about any situation you could think to care about, so chemists have no trouble using more meager computers to simulate Carbon in chemical reactions. And like chemists, our brains approximate everything we interact with.

Imagine, for a second, a hand. Now look closely at your own; did your mental model include the scaly appearance of your skin? The tiny hairs protruding from the back? The discoloration under your fingernails? The veins running along each finger’s length? For at least one of these details, I’m guessing the answer is “no.”

So when I tell you I went to Playa Ostional and saw sea turtles, you probably picture something like this:

But what I actually saw looked more like this:

And let me tell you: Crouching eight inches away from one of these creatures, you can’t help but assume you’ve landed on another planet. They don’t fit my mental models of “life on Earth” one bit.

To Be Continued . . . 

So, there’s a whole column without a trace of Magical relevance; I guess this’ll have to be a two-parter. But that’ll have to wait for two weeks—next Monday is going to kick off Selesnya Week, not just on DailyMTG, but also right here on GatheringMagic! So come back then for when I give Wizards a token of my appreciation.