Comic stories

Tuanis at 23

Funny Stories from a Year Teaching English in Costa Rica

In 1998, at twenty-three, he moved to a coffee town in the mountains of Costa Rica to teach English to schoolchildren.

In April he read his sixth graders a love poem by E.E. Cummings. After the long weekend, a girl’s mother came to his classroom door. She took her daughter out of his class and reported him to the Ministry of Education.

His bedroom door was a light-blue curtain. The house was locked at ten thirty every night. Then a woman who sold clothes out of the trunk of a red Nissan asked whether he had any jeans he didn’t need. He had one pair. They weren’t his.

And in San José, when he asked a stranger where to find un bar tuanis, a cool bar with young people, the man knew just the place.

Sixteen true stories from one year in Grecia, Costa Rica.

Kindle and Paperback.