On ants (and bugs in general)

After a restful day yesterday everyone was up with the sun today. Because of the big windows and white tile floors this house goes from full dark to gleaming the instant the sun clears the horizon. It’s bright enough that Jill’s mom has taken to wearing her wraparound sunglasses at the breakfast table.

Costa Rica is at 8 degrees north latitude, smack dab in the middle of the tropics. One thing I didn’t know is that 8 degrees latitude is too close to the equator for the Coriolis effect to create hurricanes. Costa Rica gets drenched from tropical depressions, but does not get full-on hurricanes.

Hurricanes notwithstanding, a thing that Costa Rica does have in common with all other tropical locales is BUGS. The number one bug in Costa Rica is ants. After a while you just get used to them. They are everywhere, including inside houses. There are entire expat forums devoted to rants on the subject. After much reading on the subject, I’ve concluded that a flawed expat assumption is that there’s some sort of home hygiene problem that attracts ants indoors. In Costa Rica there are effectively an infinite number of ants and they are constantly foraging. Some number of them are going to find their way indoors. Period. They do not appear to be interested in humans and neither of us has has an ant bite. Because we have white floors and the ants are large (about the size of harvester ants in the US) we are constantly catching them out of the corner of our eyes. For the first few days we tried to dispatch each one we saw. Now we just sweep up the ones that expired on the floor each night while we were sleeping. Our evolved perspective is that they’re just a part of the deal.

Then there are spiders. Jill is not a fan of spiders, no matter how many times I point out that spiders are beneficial. The spiders here are pretty impressive. They tend to be slightly larger than US spiders. And man can they move! I assume Mr. Darwin mandated that they develop speed to either catch their preferred prey or dodge the shoe-shaped cudgels of people like Jill.

They also have scorpions here. Best I can tell from my reading they’re very similar to the kind we have in Austin. If they zap you you’ll know it, but it’s nothing more than painful. We found a desiccated one in the bathroom when we moved in and the housekeeper reported one in the laundry hamper on Tuesday of last week, but we haven’t seen one on the hoof yet. I debated whether to tell Jill about the one the housekeeper saw, but I decided that she needed to know for safety purposes. We always shake our our shoes before putting them on. Again this is no different from Austin.

The astute reader will note that I have not mentioned mosquitoes. I’m pleased to report that we have seen exactly zero mosquitoes at our house.
I’ll gladly take a biblical plague of ants, spiders, and scorpions over mosquitoes! The only place Jill and I have seen any mosquitoes in Atenas is at our Spanish school, which is on a fruit farm down in the valley, and then only one day when was no breeze. We have been told that the Caribbean coast has lots of mosquitoes. We will report back on that when we take our long weekend to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, an old Caribbean port town just north of Panama. I may be setting myself up to disappointment, but for our trip to the Caribbean side I envision myself as Harrison Ford to Jill’s Helen Mirren in the movie Mosquito Coast.

Changing topics to Spanish. Following our successful outing to El Mercado with Profesora Maria on Thursday, our assignment for today was to do an oral report on our foray to Profesora Ana. On Thursday, we were given questions to ask each shopkeeper and the answers to those questions formed the basis of our report. We literally stood up at the whiteboard together to give our report to Profesora Ana. Jill and I took turns recounting our adventures and Profesora Ana was pleased. Those of you who know me know that I willingly self-report as an insecure overachiever. The upside of being an insecure overachiever is that getting words of affirmation from Profesora Ana on our sub-kindergarten level Spanish leads to an out-sized sense of accomplishment on my part. She took notes as we talked and then after we finished and then, in a very kind fashion, she went through our grammatical mistakes. We spent about a half hour drilling on those mistakes. Then she proceeded to drill us on irregular verbs. I like predictable. I like regular. Irregular verbs brought me right back down to earth.

We were both pretty tired at the end of Spanish class today. It was probably made worse by the fact that we’ve had Jill’s parents here since Thursday afternoon so we haven’t done any of our flashcard work since then. We are happy to have guests, but we need to figure out how to work in our Spanish practice even when we have guests.

We had so much fun exploring the market on Thursday that we decided to take Jill’s parents there for lunch today. I’ve been wanting to eat at a soda since we got here. Sodas are little family owned restaurants where Costa Ricans might get desayuno (breakfast) or almuerzo (lunch). There’s no concept of a menu at a soda. On any given day they’re cooking what they’re cooking. Profesora Maria told us her favorite soda at El Mercado is Soda Emanuel. After we finished with Profesora Ana today we headed back to our shanty to pick up Jill’s parents and then headed for El Mercado.

The market is pretty central to life here. For example, in addition to being the place where you get your meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables, it also happens to be where the buses arrive and depart the city centre. Most Costa Ricans don’t have cars. And even if you do have a car you would probably opt to ride the bus from Atenas into San Jose just to avoid having to drive in the legendary traffic snarl in San Jose.

Side note: Jill and I are working up the gumption to take the bus into San Jose sometime soon, but I don’t think we are quite ready for that adventure.

All of that is to say that the market was hopping at lunch time! Lots of people at the sodas grabbing a meal to go or at a pulperia (convenience store) grabbing a refresco (soft drink) or helado (ice cream) so they’d have noms for the bus ride. The kids all wear uniforms to school and best we can tell they go home for lunch so there were also groups of very well groomed children looking smart in their school uniforms getting on the bus to go home for lunch.

We got four contiguous seats at Soda Emanuel which is no mean feat during the lunch rush at a popular place that has maybe 9 stools total. The Costa Rican phrase for the plat du jour is “el casado.” Everything except the protein is set. Today our protein choices were braised beef, braised chicken, chicken a la plancha (grilled chicken), or fried fish. That protein is generally served over rice and then the day’s sides are added. Today’s sides were red beans, a delicious green bean salad, tossed salad, and fried sweet plantains. On our first foray, “pollo en salsa” (chicken simmering with potatoes) felt like the obvious choice. Plus, the braised bone-in chicken with big chunks of potato was bubbling tantalizingly away right in front of us. So I ordered “El casado para quatro con pollo en salsa.” The only thing I panicked on when ordering was drinks. I still don’t know what to call the fresh juices that seem to be available everywhere so we got 2 Coke Zeros (Jill’s parents), a regular Coke (me), and a bottle of water (Jill). And then we got a glass of ice for Nana. A point worth repeating here is that one compelling thing that sets Costa Rica apart from other Central American destinations is that the water and ice are always fit for drinking.

The food was fresh and delicious and sitting in the shade of the roof of the market the temperature was perfectly pleasant. No disposable plates or silverware either. We got proper plates and cutlery.

Side note: A thing that we’ve noticed in Costa Rica is that the only common “disposable” items are the hygenic plastic packaging for meats, the plastic bags that you put fruits and vegetables in at the feria or La Coope, and, of course, plastic grocery bags if you don’t bring your own reusable ones. We love that the throw-away culture so pervasive in the US is not obviously in evidence here.

I also enjoyed hearing other patrons order their meals and watching the staff spoon up plates to see what was commonly ordered and what certain things were called.

As we finished, we passed our plates and cutlery back over the counter so that they could be washed. At the appropriate time I got off my stool and sauntered around to the area where I’d seen others paying. Total bill for our delicious lunch for four: 13,600 Colones ($22.67). And I bet $6 of that was because only people who don’t know any better order Coca Cola products.

Jill and I (and I think Jill’s parents) came away huge fans of Soda Emanuel!

We are back at the house now. Jill has three clients this afternoon so she has the upstairs all to herself until she gives the all clear. Much to my delight, the new mesh network continues to be rock solid. My pressing task for this afternoon is to refill the hummingbird feeders. I filled them originally with clear sugar water, but have managed to attract no humming birds in almost 2 weeks. Yesterday I went looking for red food coloring to see if I could catch the attention of the hummingbirds by filling the feeders with red liquid. I could only find orange food coloring at La Coope so that will have to do :). I will report back on whether orange sugar water works any better than clear sugar water in attracting hummingbirds…