Somewhat paradoxically, by separating ourselves from the wiles of New York, we can focus on writing. Back in the city, the East Village-to-East Williamsburg commute took almost an hour each way and we weren’t writing as much, or as often, as we would’ve liked; being in the same house allows us to work more hours out of more days. Not only that, but we’re subletting our NYC apartments while we’re expats, which means the entire two-month trip, $300 round-trip airfare included, will cost us substantially less than New York rent alone for the same time period.

Add to the above factors that our house just happens to be in Playa Grande, a beautiful beach in a protected national park on the Northwest Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and a trip that at first glance seemed counterintuitive now seems like a no-brainer. It’s preposterously nice here. I haven’t yet found the words to describe the magnitude of daily niceness.

This creative retreat was predicated on a lot of ifs — it would only work if we could find tenants for our NYC apartments, if we could find cheap plane tickets, if we could find a inexpensive house available to rent for two months, and given my Spanish is more than a bit questionable — and Zack’s learned, somewhat-second language is French — if we could find our way around the country at all. Also, the most important of ifs: if the mysterious beast of creative inspiration would rear its elusive head.

All of the ifs have been squarely defeated. In an idyllic house in the middle of paradise, the project we’ve been pitching and refining for the past few months has been reinvigorated by the emergence of a Sixty-day Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Seriously, it’s really nice here.

Here are the opening 30 seconds of the broadcast:

What. Are. The odds.

While it’s not a lingering shot, there’s no mistaking… the size of my head. It’s twice the cubic volume of anyone else’s. Look at it! It’s going to cause an eclipse.

The question at hand is this: why did the producers focus on me of all people, when there were 66,000 other fans to choose from? Indeed, where were all the ladies in the crowd? What was ESPN thinking? Integral to every soccer broadcast is the gratuitous shot of the alluring female fan in facepaint and very little clothing, cheering her team on. When this is shown, viewers in cafes and pubs the world over have a transcendant, multicultural, boundary-crossing moment together. They utter verbal confirmations in their respective languages. They miraculously gain an immediate understanding of her nation’s history, culture, architectural innovations, and water quality. Some will even derive the unemployment rate and purchasing power parity. So every time a broadcast cuts to a fan of the fairer sex, citizens around the world are brought closer together… but ESPN chose to focus on me instead. Because of this decision, small-scale wars are being waged in Third World countries as we speak, involving black-market, second-hand firearms. In the middle of a war-torn street, a baby is left abandoned by its mother. It is wearing a newspaper.

The only logical conclusion to draw from all this is that ESPN’s decision to spotlight me with the opening shot of the World Cup was clearly motivated by the support of their parent company–Disney–for the activites of illegal arms trading and baby-abandoning. You heard it here first.

Compared to most American metropolitan areas, many of the cities we visited in Western Europe (e.g. Munich, Brussels, Zurich (pictured)) don’t merely look cleaner–the air quality is also leaps and bounds better than what we breathe here in the States (especially New York). For an asthmatic bastard like me, this makes all the difference in the world.

On the other hand, you can’t walk into a bar over there without breathing in second-, third-, and fiftieth-hand smoke. According to the WHO, 40% of men and 32% of women smoke in Germany, compared to 25% and 20% in America (CDC numbers). Being there, it seemed like even more of a pronounced difference. This could be because we were mostly hanging out with young people, and a third of the population in Germany smokes by age 15. That’s disturbing.

While America now manages its smokers fairly well with a ban on smoking in public places, one thing is the same between the two countries: the marketing.

Für Mehr is almost phonetic in English–it means “for more.” Smoke more and get laid more: the message is simple. Some things, I suppose, are universal.