Museo de Oro

Costa Rica has some pretty incredible museums. In my first week, I visited the Jade Museum and was rushed through the Museum of Popular Culture with the group when we visited Heredia (I really wanted to get back there, but my remaining time is disappearing fast.) I was a bit disappointed about my trip to the Jade Museum because it was very general. I mentioned this to my host family, and later to my Spanish teacher, and they both said, of course, and told me the Jade Museum is about Mexico to Northwestern Costa Rica. The more specific Museums are the Museo de Oro and the Museo Nacional.

So, one free morning, I set out to the Museo de Oro, which DID have MUCH more of what I was looking for. There were similar explanations about the use of gold as the Jade Museum had about the uses of Jade. But, at the Gold Museum, they explained where the artifacts came from as well as specifically WHO used them and how, which was often missing from the Jade. It also gave a beginners summary of the "world view" of the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica.

The next thing that I LOVED was the bookshelves of more resources to learn more at the base of the staircase to move to the next level of the museum (there were 3 floors, and you start at the bottom and work your way up. Up to the street level because the whole museum is under the Plaza de Culture) I picked out a few books I would like to find to continue my Spanish learning, and my learning about indigenous peoples of this continent. I was hoping they sold them at the gift shop, but alas.

The second floor moved from pre-Columbian Costa Rica to Contemporary Costa Rica, shared in the voices of indigenous peoples who explained in Oral History Videos the ways their culture was practiced/is practiced today. There was a video that I really want to find somewhere online to watch again (more slowly) to better understand what was being said. There were subtitles, but I was looking at this map with the colored lights and trying to listen in Spanish more than read in English.

The colored lights are the reservations today, but, at various points in the video, the sizes of the colors would change to show territory. Other times, one area would be highlighted, the area the speaker at that moment in the film came from. It really forced me, as the watcher, to understand that LAND is a very large part of the struggle to retain language and culture. You can and should say, yes, of course it is, but something about the way the lights grew and shrank next to the stories I was hearing hit me in a deeper place. I also found myself relating in a big way to the piece about language. Of the 8 tribes that still exist today, 4 still speak their native language, 2 languages are considered gone, and 2 are "in process of revitalization." One of the women spoke about having a hard time being indigenous in a colonial language. It made me think a lot about Yiddish and how my Jewish Culture and Heritage is so entwined with my Jewish Language.

The second half of the second floor was being renovated for an art exhibit that looked incredible from what I saw, but it is opening as I am leaving. I was going to skip the third floor, which was all about the Bank of Costa Rica. I am glad I didn't as there was SO MUCH to learn about the way money changed over the history of the territory of Costa Rica. The latest change was to different sizes of the money and to colors of the rainbow, with contrasting colors representing 1 and 10, 2 and 20, and 5 and 50. There are 5 men and 1 woman honored on the money, but much bigger than the people are the climates represented on the money. My favorite (the purple, which NEVER is in my wallet, because it's like the $100 bill, and I have only had one of those in my wallet once) is for the cloud forests and has a giant butterfly on it. The 5 mil colones bill is yellow with a monkey for the mongroves. It is a really cool way to create money.

I DO wish that they'd just announced that Costa Rica was going back down to using 1s and 10s, and not operating in the THOUSANDS anymore, but, I am getting better at -miliones vs -cientos vs -entas... Kinda.