We got off to an auspicious start this morning. While we were drinking coffee Jill saw a colibri (hummingbird) at the feeder. It’s the first one we’ve seen since we put them up. He hasn’t been back yet, but we are hoping he returns and brings his people.
In an effort to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s blood sugar crisis, we fueled up with cheese omelettes and fruit this morning.
We got a somewhat cryptic message on WhatsApp yesterday from Magda, our landlord. She said she has not received any money from AirBNB for our 90 day rental and wanted to discuss “rent” with us. Magda has been delightful to us so I called the AirBNB help line to see when she was going to get some money. AirBNB wouldn’t share much information beyond that they showed the first payment of $X was paid to the account holder for our property on January 28th. The amount sounded about right to me, leaving me puzzled as to why Magda was saying she hadn’t received any money.
Magda arrived to chat about 10 minutes before we were due to leave for Spanish this morning. Long story short, because English is not her first language, Magda has given the job managing of her AirBNB account to her niece. Magda’s actually paying the niece to do it as a favor to her brother (the niece’s father). The niece put her own bank account information into AirBNB when she set up the listing for this house and so the money is sitting in the niece’s account, but has not reached Magda yet. We told Magda she was on her own in getting the first payment from her niece, but that I would be happy to help her navigate the AirBNB interfaces to update the bank account attached to this listing. I asked Magda if she had the username and password for AirBNB and she said she did not, but her daughter in Florida has it. We don’t get billed for the next installment until February 28th so we’ve got a couple of weeks before more money ends up in the niece’s account. We really like Magda so we will try to help her within reason. We are Team Magda all the way, but it has occurred to me that I’ve never seen any documentation that Magda actually owns this house. I’m always leery of being a pawn in a social engineering hack. I’m definitely on the lookout for any mention of a rich Nigerian prince. I have a feeling that this particular subject will be revisited in a future blog post. 🙂
Today’s Spanish lesson was night and day from yesterday. It’s amazing how a good attitude and adequate blood sugar can change an experience. We spent the beginning of the lesson recounting to Profesora Maria our adventure to Alajuela with Profesora Ana.
Jill and I described our morning in Alajuela and I told Maria the story of Juan Santamaria. We finished by explaining that it was good to spend time in Alajuela if only to make us realize just how AWESOME Atenas is. Maria, who is from Atenas, then told us that when her husband, who is from San Jose, proposed marriage to her she said “Yes I will marry you, but only if you agree to live in Atenas.” There were no words exchanged in English by any of us during this conversation. Jill and I definitely fumbled around and had to stop speaking and hold up a finger while frantically referring back to our notes for the verb we were looking for. But we did it! It feels like we are starting to get it. We spent most of the rest of the morning doing rote memorization of the past tense conjugation of irregular verbs. And then we finished up by having to extemporize a verbal paragraph in the past tense about what I (or we) did last week using 4 randomly selected verbs, some regular and some irregular. Still lots of stumbling and laughing, but no frustration.
As we were wrapping up our discussion about Alajuela, we mentioned to Profesora Maria that the only real reasons to go to Alajuela are to go to PriceSmart, which we need to do before Jackie arrives tonight, and to the airport. Maria asked why we would schlepp the 45 minutes to all the way to PriceSmart in Alajuela when there is a PriceSmart 20 minutes away in the lovely town of Santa Ana.
Incredulous, I switched to English because I wanted to be sure I was hearing her correctly. If you know me you know Costco is serious business for me in the US. PriceSmart es lo mismo en Costa Rica. Maria assured me that the PriceSmart in Santa Ana was only 20 minutes away. I smugly pulled up Google Maps and showed her that the PriceSmart in Alajuela was 14 miles away and took 45 minutes, but the one on Santa Ana was 16 miles away so it couldn’t possibly be faster because EVERYONE knows that it takes an hour to go 20 miles in Costa Rica. Maria said, “Ah, but the road to Santa Ana is straight!”
When Jill finishes her last session at 4PM today we are going to go on a scouting mission to if we can validate Profesora Maria’s claim. Based on some further recon we have confirmed that there is a toll road involved in getting to Santa Ana. We have not yet experienced the process of paying a toll in Costa Rica. That alone should be worth the trip!
Jackie’s flight lands at around 7PM tonight. It will be a good test of our pilot/co-pilot teamwork to get back to our house from the airport in the dark.
Tomorrow morning we trade in our trusty Honda Pilot for a Hyundai Tuscon, which we will have until March 1. Then we will trade for a Honda CR-V until March 9, when we head back to Austin for intermission. Good thing we don’t have Spanish tomorrow because most of the morning will be spent on the car swap. We have to be in San Ramon at 8AM to deliver the Pilot to Cesar. Cesar will drive us to the airport where we will pick up the Hyundai Tucson at 9AM. And then we will drive back here. There are a lot of moving pieces, but our willingness to shuffle cars periodically is literally saving us $5,000 in car rental fees for our 3 month stay.
Jill and Todd in Costa Rica 