Not much to report today.

After a rough day in Spanish yesterday we spent today in class reviewing the things that were giving us trouble and while I wouldn’t say we feel *comfortable* we definitely feel more comfortable. Tomorrow should be entertaining we are meeting our teacher in town and we will get our first practical lesson. We are meeting in front of la iglesia ( the church) on the square at 8AM. We expect to have to decipher directions given in Spanish and to have some commerce-related interactions. Speaking for myself, I’m overly nervous about it, but la profesora says it’s no big deal. We will see.

By the time Jill wraps up at 6PM she will have completed three sessions today. The Internet connection dropped on the first session of the day, fortunately it dropped after the 50 minute mark when the session was effectively over. That’s the equivalent of “Injury Time” in futbol so it wasn’t catastrophic. If she makes it through this last session cleanly she will have 11 sessions under her belt with just the one drop. Not exactly five nines, but perfectly acceptable at this stage.

For some reason tonight I’m craving comfort food. We picked up a 3 pack of frozen pepperoni pizzas at PriceSmart last week and I think it’s time to break one of them out. To keep up the pretense of healthy eating, I’ll also make a salad to go with it.

Tomorrow after Spanish we head to Juan SantaMaria airport to pick up Jill’s parents, who get in at 1PM. Jill and I have had 10 days to get settled in and things are feeling surprisingly normal for the two of us. It will be interesting to see how our first guests feel about our setup.

Here we are on day two our first “real” week in Costa Rica. Last week didn’t really count because we only had two Spanish classes and Jill wasn’t up and running with her clients.

The good news is we’ve got our morning routine down:

• We are loving getting up when the sky starts to lighten and watching the sun rise over the mountains
• I’m getting pretty good in the desayuno (breakfast) department
• We know that if we roll out of here at 7:45AM we will be at Spanish school by 8AM.

In other good news we are both loving Spanish. However, we are now at the point where we are puzzled a fair amount of the time. Over the last couple of days we’ve covered the Big 5 Verbos:

• Ser
• Estar
• Haber
• Tener
• Hacer

We’ve learned when they apply and how to conjugate them. Each one makes sense in its own right, but when la profesora gives us a sheet full of sentences and tells us to drop in the right verb and conjugation hilarity ensues. Our profesora says we are doing well and I suspect we are gradually getting it, but it definitely feels like we are in the deep end of the pool. “Hacer” is my personal nemesis at this point. It appears to be catch all in a lot of ways that are not intuitive to me.

We stopped at La Coope today on the way home from school to pick up some items for dinner and breakfast. If you’re buying stuff that’s grown in Costa Rica it’s generally of fabulous quality and costs about half of what we are used to paying. The one thing that’s a little deceiving is their citrus looks pretty beat up, but is always fantastic under the peel. I think it’s because they don’t do any irrigation and the skin does it’s job protecting the fruit.

• Giant bag of fresh organic basil: $1.55
• 250 grams of granola: $1.64
• 1/2 kilo of cherry tomatoes: $1.75
• 2 Gala apples (imported): $1.56
• 15 pasture raised eggs: $2.64 (eggs are priced by the kilo)

We were out the door at La Coope for $9.15.

Today Jill has four clients, which is the most she plans to have in one day. So this will be the initial barometer of how she feels after 3 hours of intensive Spanish in the morning and a full slate in the afternoon. My job is to keep her fed and hydrated. Another mark in the good news column is that with three clients down and one to go Jill reports “No hay problema!” I’m delighted to report that things are working as desired on the IT front.

An interesting question is what I will do with myself while Jill is working in the afternoons Monday through Thursday. I’m going to stay close to home in the near term because until we are certain that things are rock solid I want to be available to Jill in the event of technical issues. I’ve got a healthy reading list, but if anyone has a life changing book they think I need to read please let me know.

We took advantage of Jill’s one hour break to do our daily walk down the hill and back up. We’re both pretty floored by the native flora. We’re still discovering new things with each walk. Here’s what we found today:

One of my goals is to have dinner ready to plate when Jill has a therapy day that ends at dinner time. For dinner tonight I’m making gnocchi. We bought a three pack of gnocchi at PriceSmart, which I will serve with olive oil, basil, tomatoes, garlic, salt, and pepper. Simple but delicious!

After dinner we have Spanish homework plus flash cards.

Jill’s parents arrive Thursday at 1PM. I believe we are ready for our first guests. We will be going afield with them to take in volcanoes and waterfalls so maybe my upcoming posts will be a little less de riguer.

I should probably have a gin and tonic ready for Jill when she commutes back down the stairs from her office at 6PM to celebrate a good day all the way around!

We were back in Spanish class this morning. This was our hardest class yet. We spent much of the day on the verbs “ser” and “estar.” Jill is ahead of me on this front. I’m constantly mixing up “soy” and “estoy”. According to our profesora, “ser” is for things that are permanent and “estar” is for things that are temporal. There are, of course, categorical exceptions.

For now all I know is:

• Yo soy un hombre.
• Yo estoy feliz.

One of the key premises that made our trip to Costa Rica possible is that, while I’m on sabbatical, Jill is able to maintain her therapy practice via the Internet. She has spent the last several months experimenting with that mode of therapy and making sure that her clients are comfortable with it. The plan, as currently conceived, is that we will take Spanish lessons from 8AM-11AM Monday through Thursday mornings and Jill will see a few clients via video in the afternoons of those days. That will leave us Friday-Sunday each week to explore Costa Rica. My role in that scheme is IT support, head chef, chauffeur, and other duties not explicitly listed.

Because preserving Jill’s practice during this adventure is the prime directive, I take my IT duties seriously. Since we hit the ground, I’ve been obsessing over connectivity, bandwidth, and WiFi coverage at our house. I’ve got triple-redundant Internet (wired fiber, mobile hotspot, and phone hotspot) and have WiFi coverage improvements en route from Estados Unidos.

Today was the payoff on the IT front. Jill had her first for-real clients in Costa Rica today (she had an intern last week as a dry run). Modulo an audio issue that we think is now sorted, the speed, latency, and stability of the primary Internet connection have been perfectly acceptable for the first two clients. Jill has two more later. If those go well technically, I will be comfortable that our setup is sufficient for Jill and her clients.

Given that I am currently without portfolio and that Jill’s practice is now up and running at Southern HQ, I am officially a kept man. I’m already feeling the pressure to keep up my appearance in case Jill starts looking to trade up.

This update feels kind of light compared to my previous posts, but I’m exhausted. I think that’s because I’ve been so focused on ensuring Jill’s first day as an expatriate therapist goes smoothly.

Last night we were treated to an impromptu fireworks show a few miles down the valley. Whoever it was, they must have brought in the professionals as it was quite a show.

Since we’ve been running around quite a bit we decided to stick close to home today. We started off the morning with our normal sunrise coffee service. Then we did a little bit of yoga on the upper patio (I bet no one reading this would have ever guessed I’d be doing sunrise yoga in Costa Rica).

At the feria on Friday we bought some artisinal cheese, which allowed me to dress up my breakfast repertoire a little bit. Todays’ breakfast was a tomato and semiduro queso omelette with mango, honeydew, and watermelon fruit salad.

I’ve been wrestling with the WiFi in the house since we got here. The WiFi is great upstairs where Jill will be doing her online counseling, but it’s crap in the main house. We are both tired of holding our phones up the ceiling to try to get on the network. I continued to screw around with it this morning and decided to nuke and pave the whole setup. Fortunately Jill’s parents are coming to visit on Thursday so I put in an order for four Google WiFi endpoints. If anyone has any sort of home WiFi issues I cannot recommend the Google WiFi mesh network approach strongly enough.

Today marks one week since we landed in Costa Rica. We are getting settled in to the house. At home we keep pictures on our refrigerator to remind us of our great our life is. Jill, being super smart, packed a care package of pictures for our refrigerator in this house to make it feel more like home.

Since we resume Spanish lessons tomorrow at 8AM, we spent this morning doing our Spanish homework from Thursday’s class. We also went through all of our flashcards twice going from Spanish to English. Currently it’s easier for us to look at the Spanish word and figure out what it means in English. Hopefully soon we will be able to do the flash cards in English and translate them to Spanish.

After studying for a while we decided to knock off an walk down the hill from our house to get some exercise. Technically the exercise actually happens on the walk back UP the hill. We hope to get to the point were we can do it without bending over and holding on to our shorts to catch our breath.

After yoga, studying, and our hike down the hill we decided to reward ourselves with lunch at a restaurant, preferably someplace that the locals eat. We had a couple of items to pick up at La Coope so we kept our eyes peeled on the way there for likely lunch spots. La Fiesta de las Pupusas de Atenas was clearly hopping. La Fiesta also had the requisite guy in a yellow vest orchestrating the parking ballet. Having learned my lesson, I made eye contact and waited for him direct a car out of a spot then he motioned me into the newly vacated spot. I’m not sure whether I did a good job of parking or if he was just too busy to critique my parking, but for the first time in Costa Rica I was not shamed into moving my vehicle. Otra victorio pequeno!

There were 4 beefy motorcycles to the left of our vehicle, between us and the next vehicle. That will come into play momentarily.

Jill and I picked a table and sat down. We were delighted to see the place was full of Tico families. There was only one other table of gringos (I came into this adventure thinking gringo was a term I should avoid using, but we’ve had several different people volunteer to us that the term gringo is the non-pejorative and culturally appropriate way to refer to Americans, Canadians, and northern Europeans). The other gringos were four guys in motorcycle gear who clearly belonged to the motorcycles next to our car. Someone came over to give us menus and ask what we would like to drink. We correctly asked for two glasses of water (Dos vasos de agua, por favor). If you mess that up they will bring you expensive bottles of water instead of glasses of tap water. One of the main reasons we picked Costa Rica is the water is safe to drink.

Our guy then proceeded to fire off a question we couldn’t understand, which we took as a good sign. Our Spanish must have been good enough when ordering water that he assumed we were more knowledgeable than we are. At that point he handed us off to someone who spoke English. That gentleman gave us the lay of the land and recommended the Pupusas Mixto (queso, frijoles, and pork). We went with his recommendation.

Just after we ordered our waitperson came over and asked if we were in the grey car next to the motorcycles. Unsure of what was going on, I was relieved to say “No es mi carro.” Apparently one of the four gringo motorcyclists had too much cerveza and managed to tip his very heavy bike over when mounting it and it fell against the grey car putting a dent in the passenger side door. What followed was a comic scene where the motorcyclists spoke no Spanish and the car owner spoke no English and or waiter was translating for everyone. It was 20 uncomfortable minutes of motorcycle guys staring at the ground with their hands in their pockets, the car owner with his arms crossed, our waiter doing shuttle diplomacy, and a crowd on onlookers stopping to see the show. At some point someone must have called a tow truck, for which there was clearly no need, and that guy joined the circle and was trying to figure out what he was doing there.

In spite of our guy being involved in the rodeo outside, the pupusas arrived quickly. The man who delivered them also arrived with a freshly filled crock full of a cabbage and vinegar slaw (Rich Mosher – no mayonesa) and a pair of tongs in a sanitary sleeve. He also brought us a spoon in a sanitary sleeve for scooping out the pickled relish in a jar at the table (think pickled carrots, jalapenos, onions, and celery) and pantomimed what we should do with the slaw and relish. The addition of the slaw and relish was truly transformative. I thought I liked pupusas before, but now I REALLY like them. We are now professionals and can help any of our visitors through the proper dressing of a pupusa 🙂

We watched how everyone paid and determined that the checkout process was to go to the Caja at the back of the restaurant and give them your table number, which they would use to look up your bill. Confirming that we were table fourteen I confidently strode to the back of the line and watched two guys in front of me checkout. When it was my turn I said “Catorce”. Once again I got a question I couldn’t parse so I admitted I’m just starting to learn Spanish. I gave him my best “Como se llama?” and learned that his name is Alfonso. He told me in slow Spanish that our bill was 6900 Colones ($11.50). I paid and we chatted for a bit. I told Alfonso (yup, we’re now on a first name basis) how much we’d enjoyed the meal and the lesson in how to eat pupusas. He told me that the next time we MUST try their fresh fruit drinks as they take the pupusas to the next level. I pointed at Jill told him we would be back soon to try the full experience. I also asked how the guy in the yellow vest directing traffic gets paid and he said he works for tips (which makes me think I should have tipped the yellow vest guys in our earlier encounters).

We tipped the yellow vest guy and I pointed my arm in our desired direction of travel so he would know which way to hold the traffic. Once we were in reverse he held us until pedestrians cleared behind us and then gave us hand signals to back out. We backed out and I thought we were golden. About that time a motorcycle traveling the wrong way in our lane of travel tried to swing into our parking spot. We had what I can only describe as a Costa Rican standoff until our yellow vest guy cleared a little more room for us to back further out. The moral of the story: If you see a guy in a yellow vest in Costa Rica you want him on your team.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and I have managed to get us set up to stream the big game. I’m not really interested, but Jill loves the commercials. We will watch in our TV room upstairs while drinking our box of Cabernet (you read that right) and munching on popcorn (if I can figure out how this inductive stove top works).

Jill’s side note: I’ve noticed myself slowing down today. Our house doesn’t have a dishwasher so we’ve been washing our dishes by hand. This morning I was washing the dishes, looked up at the view, and felt joy. I felt joy for having a beautiful view of nature, for being here with my favorite person, and for not having anything pressing to do. So washing a few dishes was perfectly rewarding. In Austin, I’ve been so busy rushing to the next task I forgot to pay attention to the simple tasks at hand. I like this slowing down.

We were up a little bit before the sun this morning as we had a two hour drive to the Bojas del Toro Catarata (waterfall). It’s billed as the tallest falls in Costa Rica. We’d read that the roads were quite narrow and winding with crazy steep pitch. We figured if we could get an early start we could minimize frequency of us having to deal with oncoming traffic on the way. We rolled out of bed around 5:30AM and caught a spectacular sunrise.

Then we had coffee, scarfed down some yogurt with granola, and were on the road at about 6:05AM to make the trek outlined on the map below.

Today I learned an important lesson about driving in Costa Rica. The lesson is: Downshift on steep grades! The grades are so steep here that if you leave your automatic transmission in Drive you can end up riding the brakes long enough that they start to get hot and lose performance. The brakes on our car have been perfectly fine up to this point, but toward the bottom of the long steep grade to get us to the park we were coming up on a hairpin turn and I pushed the brakes all the way to the floor trying to reduce speed (from about 7 mph to about 3 mph) with negligible results. I was able to pump the brakes to get the car stopped. If there’d been oncoming traffic at that point I would have needed new underwear. I’d been on the brakes for maybe 15 minutes straight at that point to get from the top of the mountain to the valley. For the rest of the day we took descents in either first or second gear depending on the speed and quality of the road and let the gearing govern our top end speed keeping the brakes cool and working just fine. In this case the lesson did not come at great expense, but it was scary nonetheless.

We made it safely to the Bajos del Toro entry at exactly 8AM. We were the first visitors of the day. A funny thing about Costa Rica is that at public attractions there always seems to be a guy telling you where to park. And if you park yourself without their direction they will motion you to make an arbitrary adjustment. At the Zoo yesterday, I parked between two white lines and according to the parking attendant I was 2 centimeters too close to the line on the right side. Today at Bajos del Toro we were literally the only car in a grass field and as I was exiting the vehicle the parking attendant had me pull forward 2 feet. It’s puzzling, but maybe it’s a part of the full employment effort in Costa Rica. There’s no tourist shakedown involved and they’re not looking for a tip. The attendants appear to be employees of the establishment whose job it is to keep the parking neat and tidy. Be that as it may, we got ourselves sorted and went to the administration building to pay our park entry fee, which was $10 US for each of us. In exchange for our $20 we each got nightclub-style hand stamps and, best I can tell with my limited Spanish, an admonition to not horse around on the hanging bridge.

We set off and the three resident dogs trotted along with us. Two of the three dogs stayed with us for the entire trek. When I die I think I’d like to come back as one of the Bojas del Toro dogs. I have to say that the Bojas del Toro experience rivals the prettiest landscape I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been to New Zealand). The drive in was stunning. The hike to the falls was through temperate rain forest with 200 foot trees and then through mountain meadows. And the falls, hidden until the last moment, were a breathtaking surprise. Plus the water has a similar rock flour appearance to the rivers in New Zealand, which reminds me of all things Lockerd.

Jill and I crossed the hanging bridge keeping regular order and set off for the falls.

We both kept marveling at the beauty of the park.
I’m not making this up… At one point Jill spontaneously declared that she was Maria in The Sound of Music and started spinning around with her arms out on one of the vistas.

Totally worth the 2 hour drive each way! The hike to the major falls may be a little strenuous for some of our vistors, but we will take any of our guests who are up for it.

By the time we got back to Atenas it was lunch time and we were both famished. Exploring new lands is hungry work. We decided to go to Kay’s Gringo Postres for a comfort food lunch. Kay’s is run by Anya who is from Poland by way of Toronto and she serves up delicious American and Polish fare. Jill had a cheeseburger and fries and I had a “Hungarian Pancake”, which was basically a beef stew torta topped with sour cream. It was so good I even ate the beet salad that came with it. Those who know me know that I detest beets, but this preparation was actually quite delicous. We chatted with Anya for a little while after lunch and promised to bring the big Praisners by for a pierogi and galumpki lunch when they are in town. Total cost for lunch was 9,500 colones, just under $16. A far sight better than our crappy $80 lunch yesterday!

We made it back to our house right around 1PM, feeling like we’d already had a full day. I made afternoon coffee for us and started on this update, while Jill wrestled with getting today’s photos uploaded to Google Photos. We’ll both be glad when Jackie gets here with the Google WiFi mesh network gear. Then maybe we won’t have to stand in the garage and hold our phones up to the ceiling to connect 🙂

One final research note… I figured out what common American houseplant the ubiquitous living fenceposts are.
They are Corn Plants (Dracaena Massangeana)

 

Time for happy hour with some of Jill’s new signature pico de gallo and chips. And maybe a gin and tonic…

Thursday night is date night so we decided our first date night in Costa Rica was as good a time as any to try driving at night. It was also our first foray into Atenas where we were going to park on the street. There’s plenty of parking, but there are giant vertical-sided 18″ deep gutters on the shoulder of the streets to handle rainy season deluges. It is very important that one does not try to park too close to the curb because the gutter is deeper than wheel radius of all but the biggest vehicles. This is the kind of thing that pegs my anxiety-o-meter. We managed to park successfully, if maybe a little further out in the street than all of the other cars. Pizzeria de Finca was our target destination. They serve super thin cracker crust pizza and it was fantastic. We got a big salad to share as a starter and split a large pizza. We also splurged on a perfectly adequate bottle of Chilean Merlot. Total bill including tax and tip 21,000 Colones or about $34, with the wine accounting for $13 of the total. Because the hill up to our house is harrowing, we only had one glass of wine each and just put the cork in the bottle to bring home with us. After dinner, we walked over to Pops on the town square for helado (ice cream). I got 2 scoops and Jill got one. Total cost for our postres (dessert) was 3300 colones or $5.50. The full date night tally came in at just under $40. Plus we have now vetted at least one scripted night out with any of our upcoming house guests. Also there was some question as to whether we could navigate the track up to our house in the dark. We put that to rest.

This morning we woke up excited to go to the feria (farmer’s market) with Magda. We executed our new-normal ritual of coffee followed by an omelette, performed our respective morning beauty regimens and were at Magda’s house at 7:45AM.

A note on feria’s: Apparently it is the case that every town in Costa Rica has a feria on Friday mornings and that, whatever your home town is, you are convinced that your town’s feria is best one. Our first experience with this phenomenon was with Javier, our driver from the airport to the hotel on our first night. We mentioned that we were excited to go to the feria on Friday and he told us we should skip the Atenas feria because it was crap and go to the one in Alajuela because it was better.

I can truthfully report that the Atenas feria is fantastic. Because there are lots of things that we’ve never heard of Magda took us around and showed us what was on offer and got the purveyors to give us samples so that we could taste them. Then Magda turned us loose because she had to do her own shopping. We went pretty light on this go round, because like the grocery store, it was a little overwhelming. We also got to practice our numbers because the purchases were generally by kilo and for that reason the purchase prices were not nice round numbers. I was delighted when I successfully deciphered that the half a watermelon we bought was 1,750 colones and I handed the lady correct change on the first go. We ended up buying: watermelon, honeydew mellon, coffee, artisinal cheese, cilantro, tomatoes, red onions, arugula, homemade corn tortilla chips, and avocados. Everything was sourced from the canton of Atenas and the total bill came out to about $20 with $10 of that going toward the coffee. For example our kilo of tomatoes was 500 colones or about 80 cents. Next Friday when Jill’s parents are here we will be more organized and will go with a list.

We brought our feria purchases home and then immediately set out for today’s marquis event: Zoo Avenue, a conservation and rehabilitation park for animals that have been rescued. We navigated to Zoo Avenue with no issues and paid the $20 per person entry fee, which all goes to fund the operation. This may also be a good destination to bring visitors as they have everything from colorful toucans to jaguars to crocodiles and caymans. And there was a 6 foot long iguana standing on the sidewalk that we had to walk around. The only mistake we made all day was not timing lunch better. I ran out of gas at the zoo and we popped into the associated restaurant for lunch.

Here’s where we got cocky… Maybe it was low blood sugar or maybe we were just working on our Spanish and enjoying being able to banter with our waiter, but the net result was we let ourselves get upsold on lunch and ran our lunch tab up to $80 for food that was mediocre at best. We shrugged it off as a learning experience. Now we know that when the waiter tells you that the chef has a fantastic special of very fresh shrimp we need to ask “Cuanto cuesta?” We were also in what was clearly a marked tourist trap.

Before today we’d never driven to the airport. Because Jill’s parents arrive next Thursday for a visit we felt it was important for us to be able to navigate to and properly park at the airport. Freshly fueled up from our $80 lunch we departed Zoo Avenue and headed for the airport. I repeat what I said yesterday about Jill and I communicating very well in the car. The airport ingress and egress is a little harrowing, but Jill talked me through it and we did great. We are now fully capable of taking possession of our guests when they walk out of the arrivals hall and getting them back to our chateau.

Our final logistical first of the day was to fill our car up with gas for the first time. All gas stations in Costa Rica are full service. I practiced saying “Lleno de regular, por favor” (Full of regular, please) and that transaction went without a hitch. I was pleasantly surprised to find that gas in Costa Rica is currently $3.56 per gallon.

Once back from the airport I made Jill afternoon coffee and set about preparing our feria fruit purchases for consumption. I admit that I really like turning big stuff into little stuff, which makes preparing fruit something that gives me joy. While I was doing that, Jill swept our floors (it’s been windy the last few days and with some of the windows open the house is a wind tunnel when you open the door and dust gets sucked in) and made Spanish flash cards.

Everyone in Costa Rica has a side-hustle. Our landlord Magda has to be the hardest working woman in Costa Rica. She let us know a couple of days ago that she has a party coming into the restaurant she has at the bottom of the hill and asked if we’d like to join. We jumped at that offer so we will have 2 date nights in a row. Tonight Magda is making us sea bass cooked in a lemon butter caper sauce for $12 each. We also had her reserve a bottle of what she says is a fantastic Chilean wine for us. For that reason we are walking down to dinner and will take our flashlights for the walk back up. No way am I attempting to drive back up this hill if I’m not fully in control of my faculties.

Tomorrow Jill and I are off bright and early to Bajos del Toro Cataratas to check off another waterfall!

Parting note: You may have noticed a lot of financial accounting in today’s update. I have started tracking all of our expenditures because Jill and I both want to know what it really costs to live in Costa Rica.

Jill’s side note: There are a lot of spiders in Costa Rica. I’m not good at getting close enough to a spider to kill it so I’ll have to figure something out. And did I mention the spiders are HUGE!

Our plan to get our circadian rhythm aligned with the daylight hours seems to be working. We are having no trouble getting out of bed when the sky lightens at 5:45AM and we’ve been in bed reading by 8:30PM each night with lights out by 9PM. We don’t have WiFi coverage in the bedroom, which is turning out to be a hidden benefit. My habit in Austin is to spend an hour or so in bed at night digesting the news of the day and the Internet in general before I switch to reading a book. Without the Internet rabbit hole available to me in bed I’m having an easier time getting to sleep and my brain is not churning on whatever topic I just read about.

Day two of Spanish class was todo bien! Maria, who is our profesora on Tuesdays and Thursdays, does not speak to us in English at all, but she is quite patient with us. Today we got started on learning the masculine feminine rules and exceptions and also got into some adjectives. We were a little more spent at the end of this class than we were yesterday with Ana.

All in all, from the time we woke up until the end of Spanish class felt well choreographed and we think it will be easy to keep our routine Monday through Thursday.

We stopped at Maxi Pali on the way home to buy a cookie sheet, which will double as a serving tray, some index cards to make Spanish flash cards, and a bag of ice. I was particularly pleased with my checkout experience because I indicated that I wanted to add a bag of ice onto my purchase… “y una bolsa de hielo, por favor.” The lady nodded and I got my ice. Chalk up another victoria pequena!

Jill and I decided we were ready to make our first foray into one of Costa Rica’s natural areas after Spanish class. We are going to try to hit as many of the waterfalls as we can during our stay. Today’s destination was Los Chorros Cataratas (waterfalls). We popped by the house, scarfed down some lunch, filled our water bottles, threw some sunscreen and towels into our day pack and we were off! Los Charros is about 15 miles from our house, but the Waze lady was telling us it was a 45 minute drive. We now know why it’s a 45 minute drive. We traversed an area where there are lots of sugar cane fields and there were probably only about 15 minutes out of the 45 that we were not on narrow roads behind a tractor pulling trailers full of freshly harvested sugar cane to the processing facility. The roads were in good shape and the only dirt road we were on was the last quarter mile to the Los Charros trailhead. An interesting phenomenon we’ve noticed in Costa Rica is that the fence posts tend to be living plants. There’s a common houseplant in the US that apparently is native to this area and grows dead straight and is perfect for fence posts. I’ll have to figure out what they’re called.

I’d like to take a moment and heap praise on my wife. If you’ve ever driven in a foreign country it can be a little tense. Jill has been the perfect co-pilot. We are communicating exceptionally well in the car, which is super important in Costa Rica because none of the roads are labeled and some of the turns indicated in Waze are suprise on 270-degree hairpins with no shoulder on one side and a precipitous dropoffs on the other side that you need to take at about 5 mph to avoid dying. Jill gives me a running commentary of what’s coming up and she also helps me figure out when the coast is clear to swing around the sugar cane tractor trailers. She’s killing it! We only had one near catastrophe today and it was my fault. I was busy backing up down a tight street to allow a Mack truck swing onto the same street from a right turn. I was so proud of myself for executing that maneuver flawlessly that I got a little cocky pulling across the intersection afterward and cut it a little close on the cross traffic. Disculpe!

When we got to Los Charros we were met by a nice man named Luis at the trailhead. Luis guided us to our parking spot and pointed us to the trailhead. We were a little perplexed as to Luis’ role in this enterprise, but we just went with it – more on that later. We locked our car following the golden rule of not leaving anything in our car worth stealing. This was also our first outing leaving our passports behind (we haven’t gotten clarity on whether we really need them with us, but we both have pictures of our passports and immigration stamps on our phones and I have a hard time believing we are going to get thrown in the slammer for not having them).

The hike into Los Charros was about 20 minutes on a good trail. Going in was easy, mostly because we descended about 700 feet. There were two fantastic waterfalls. This was the first time I’ve taken Jill on a hike where she needed to get her feet wet. I’ve been drawn to splashing through mountain streams since I was about 14 years old . I was secretly hoping Jill would be game for tromping up the stream to get to the waterfalls and she came through like a champ 🙂 She also got to cross a hanging bridge today!

The two waterfalls were fantastic and even though it’s a popular tourist destination there was not one spec of litter anywhere.

We spent about 30 minutes looking at the falls and started our trek back up the canyon. Not nearly as easy as the descent, but the temperature was nice and we weren’t any hurry.

When we got back to our car, I asked Luis where we pay the access fee for the park and he said there was no fee, but he accepted donations. We gave Luis 10,000 Colones (about $16) and he was delighted. When we got home, Jill researched a little further and here’s the story on Luis. There used to be a government owned and maintained road to Los Chorros park, but it was wiped out in a landslide and the government hasn’t gotten around to fixing it. The only available ingress/egress is now through Luis’ property. He has generously allowed the Los Churros visitors to park on his land and transit by foot to the trailhead. Luis doesn’t charge anything, but is happy to accept donations as you leave. We think the world needs more people like Luis.

We made it back to our shanty by 3PM and I made Jill a well earned cup of afternoon coffee and sat down to type this update. Tonight we are going to go to Pizzeria Finca for dinner. According to TripAdvisor Pizzeria Finca is the number one rated of 22 restaurants in Atenas. It has 3 parking spots. We will report back on our experience.

Tomorrow morning at 8AM we are going with Magda, our landlord, to the feria (weekly farmer’s market). We are both looking forward to that.

We both slept a little fitfully last night, likely because we were nervous about our first day of Spanish school. We were both up with the sun and drinking coffee at the upstairs bar by 6AM. Learning on an empty stomach is not for me so I fixed us each an omelette and sliced up some fresh mango to go with the pineapple we already had sliced up in the refrigerator. The fruit here is amazing.

We rolled out of our place at 7:45AM to be punctual for our 8AM start of class.

Our profesora Ana, who will be teaching us on Lunes y Miercoles (you may know them as Mondays and Wednesdays) is fantastic. She’s 66 years old and is retired but teaches a couple of mornings a week at the school to stay active. We love Ana. Today being our first lesson, Ana was base-lining what we know and teaching us the appropriate salutations and how to answer biographical questions, like “De donde es usted?” We learned that it’s important to ask people you meet these types of questions. For example, if someone asks you “Como esta usted?”, you better not stop your answer at “Bien.” To be polite the question must be passed back as “Bien. Y usted?” Those of you who know me know that I’m not super in tune with social cues so I’m paying extra close attention so as not to come off as rude accidentally.

It was obvious pretty quickly that Jill and I have different strengths in terms of where we are starting. I’m reasonably proficient with numbers, days, and months and the names of things, but I cant put a non-canned sentence together to save my life. Jill can already make sentences and was asking her questions (o preguntas) in Spanish, where I would ask my questions in English and get an answer back from Ana in Spanish. Ana picked up on the fact that at about the 2.5 hour mark we were both a little overwhelmed so she shifted gears and we finished the lesson with flashcards depicting various items of produce we might buy at La Coope or at the feria (weekly farmers’ market). We both did well at the flash cards, which made it feel like we were ending on a high note.

Tomorrow we will meet our other profesora, Maria. If Maria is the same caliber as Ana, we are golden. In summary, we both went into the first morning of school a little anxious, but we finished feeling totally at home and like we’ve found the right place for us to learn Spanish.

We stopped by the Maxi Pali, a grocery store that is owned by Walmart, on the way home from school to pick up some eggs and some dried basil (so far we have not seen fresh basil in Costa Rica; maybe there will be some at the feria on Friday) for the gnocchi I am making for dinner tomorrow night. On a flyer, at the checkout I asked if they “Vendes Kolbi recargo?” and got a nod from the checker. I asked to put 10,000 Colones on my SIM card, reading the number over her shoulder as she typed it in.

On the way home we also stopped at the neighborhood store that’s on the way to our house. It’s a cute little place and we will be shopping there to pick up little items that don’t warrant a trip to La Coope or Maxi Pali.

When we got home I fired up my mobile hot-spot and I got a green light and an Internet connection!!!! I also figured out how to check the remaining balance on my prepaid account (text “Saldo” to 8888 from the the text function on the hot-spot). I got a disproportionate feeling of accomplishment from that minor victory. I’m making this update while connected to the hot-spot just to reinforce to myself that I have slayed this particular dragon (at least for now).

We treated ourselves to a decadent lunch of Ritz crackers, sharp cheddar cheese, and sliced up Gala apples. It tasted like victory!

Jill just finished a one hour video session with one of her interns and the house WiFi worked brilliantly. We had a minor moment of panic last night when one of the online software packages Jill uses wasn’t reachable, but when we turned on the VPN to route the traffic through the US it worked just fine. Whew!

I think we are going to take advantage of the remaining daylight and walk down the hill from our house and explore the recreational options available to us. We’ve been told that there’s a putt-putt golf course on property 🙂

Having gotten to bed at 8:30 last night, Jill and I were up with the sun today. Our goal is to make the most of daylight hours. By 6AM we were drinking coffee in the lounge chairs on the upper deck working on this morning’s update.

Today we had three missions:

1. Make the drive to Spanish school and introduce ourselves in advance of tomorrow’s inaugural lesson.
2. Find the PriceSmart in Alajuela, the nearest sizable town and lay in some necessities.
3. Get my mobile hotspot sorted.

Finding Spanish school was a little bit of a challenge because the directions involved finding “the dirt road on the left just before the big blue water tank”. We found the big blue water tank, but not the road. On closer inspection there was a utility crew working on a power line just before the big blue water tank and their truck was parked so as to block the dirt road. Once we figured that out we had to squeeze by the utility truck and then we were golden. We met Juan Diego, the very nice man who runs the school. Juan Diego did his best to reassure us as Jill and I admitted that we were a little nervous about learning Spanish. In a very nice way he said something to the effect of “I promise you can learn Spanish.” Diego then proceeded to tell us two VERY important things:

1. “The biggest issue with spouses learning a language together is that they can get competitive and not in a healthy way. Please do not let that happen.” Good thing I’m not the least bit competitive…
2. “If you ask someone in Costa Rica for directions to a destination, they would rather make something up than tell you they don’t know. Always ask multiple people for directions until you hear the same directions from two different people.”

We will have two teachers: Anna on Mondays and Wednesdays and Maria on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We meet Anna tomorrow at 8AM for our first session.

From Spanish school we were off to PriceSmart. It was about a 45 minute drive and I think we did quite well. Waze is invaluable here. Once in the PriceSmart parking lot we immediately felt comfortable as it’s a standard Costco setup with all the signs in Spanish. We went in to the membership desk and got our shiny new membership cards then we went to the food court because we were both starving.

Once we’d scarfed down lunch we were off to do our shopping. We splurged on some cheese, which is about double what it costs in the US. We got a big box of Ritz crackers, our theory being that if we get homesick cheese on Ritz crackers will be an effective antidote. We did not buy a rotisserie chicken, but we confirmed that they cost about $6.50. We got a six pack of coconut milk, some Nature Valley granola bars, and some hazelnut creamer for Jill’s coffee. That was the sum total of the “exotic” foodstuffs we bought. We also got a sideboard dish drying rack, as there’s no dishwasher in the house. But I happen to enjoy hand washing dishes so that’s a net positive. Checkout was a bit of a minefield. I tried to be helpful and inserted my credit card. The checkout person just shook his head and pulled the card out of the reader and handed it back to me. I now know that the process goes as follows… The checker rings up all of the items and asks you how you want to pay. If it’s a card, they manually put the total into the credit card terminal and ONLY THEN do you get the green light to put in your card.

Buoyed by our success at PriceSmart we navigated to the Kolbi wireless store in Alajuela. It was like one of those jewelry stores where they buzz you in and a security guard ran a wand over both of us. Don’t construe that as the area being unsafe. It was an upscale shopping center with plenty of foot traffic. It was more like the Kolbi store was trying to be like an upscale Beverly Hills jeweler. Once we were through security we spoke to a nice lady, who basically refused to sell me a prepaid SIM card on the basis that it’s so much more expensive than a postpaid plan. I asked how much a postpaid plan costs and she told me I couldn’t get one because I’m not a Costa Rican resident. You can see where this is going. Over time I convinced her that I really could afford to spend $30 a month on a prepaid plan and she finally relented. I thought for sure I was home free, but then she printed a piece of paper and pointed me at the back room where there was a casting call of characters waiting for a single person at a desk to service their requests. I declared NO JOY and we beat a tactical retreat to the car, stunning the lady who had just spent 15 minutes giving me a coveted number for the queue. Costa Rica 2 – Todd 0.

We made it back to the hacienda without incident and I made Jill afternoon coffee. We then went upstairs to check out her work space for when she resumes seeing clients next week.

We needed a couple of items for dinner so we went into La Coope to pick them up. We asked where we could buy a hummingbird feeder and were directed to the veterinary supply store across the street. By “veterinary supply” I mean supplies for dairy farms and cattle ranches with a side of equine products. I asked the guy behind the counter for “hummingbird feeders” and he just shrugged. Jill pulled up google translate and said the Spanish word for hummingbird, which is “colibri”. Without shifting position the man behind the counter looked about 2 feet above my head where there were two hummingbird feeders hanging from coiled rope. Best I can tell those two humming bird feeders were the only non-bovine non-equine things in the entire store so we bought both of them.

Feeling like we were on a roll, I insisted that we find a local purveyor of Kolbi SIM cards. We strolled to downtown Atenas and found a store that sold them. Fifteen minutes later, wherein my passport was phoned into a higher authority and I forked over $2, I had a shiny newly-activated SIM card. I asked what I needed to do to add some prepaid funds to my account and was informed that they could only sell me the SIM card, but couldn’t charge it up for me. You can see where this is going, right? The nice lady pointed me to a corner store and instructed me to tell the man that I needed “Kolbi recargo” and to give him the 8-digit phone number for the new card. Jill and I walked over and got in line behind a couple of people buying sodas. When it was my turn I proudly announced “Kolbi recargo vente mil Colones” and slid my new phone number across to him. He asked if I wanted a receipt and I said “Si”. Sixty seconds later I handed over my 20,000 Colones (about $35) and he handed me my transaction receipt. Here’s where I messed up. When you load a prepaid SIM you really need to double-check that the funds went to the right card. We got back to the house and I popped the SIM in my hotspot and fired it up. No luck in connecting with the network. I screwed around with it for a few minutes and then got my receipt out. That’s when I discovered that the guy had mis-typed one digit of my phone number, but I didn’t have my reading glasses with me at the store and the 8 that should have been a 6 was too small for me to read. I successfully put 20,000 colones on SOMEONE ELSE’s SIM card. As they say in Costa Rica, “Con muchu gusto!” Costa Rica 3 – Todd 0. However, I do feel like tomorrow is going to be my day.

Jill’s homemade pico de gallo continues to be life-alteringly good. And happy hour soothed any lingering sting from my SIM card woes.

Dinner is complete and we are putting the wraps on another fantastic day in Costa Rica.

The last 36 hour have been a whirlwind of new experiences, with a side of panic. Our arrival in Costa Rica was uneventful, outside of me snapping at Jill once on the airplane (apparently I get snippy when I’m nervous).

We made it through immigration with no problems. Jill went to wait for our luggage while I went to the Kolbi cell phone stand to get a Costa Rican SIM card. I stood in line for 10 minutes only to find out that I needed my passport to buy a SIM card. My passport was tucked safely into Jill’s purse. Costa Rica 1 – Todd 0. We will make another attempt at getting a SIM card today when we visit the “big” town of Alajuela to go to PriceSmart (Costco).

Luggage retrieval went without a hitch. Our driver, Javier, was front and center when we exited the arrivals hall. Javier took us to his sub-compact car, where we proceeded to wedge all of our luggage into every nook and cranny. I rode in the front seat with Javier because Jill was sitting next to a suitcase in the back seat. Dinner options in Costa Rica are sparse at 9PM on a Sunday evening, but Jill and I both had low blood sugar and needed food. Javier came through with a great taco place. We can attest that delicious tacos al pastor exist in Costa Rica!

We made it to the Boutique Hotel Villa Toscana, where we stayed last time, at around 10:30 on Sunday night. Jill had just enough energy to reacquaint herself with Fritz, her favorite German shepherd on the whole planet, and then fall into bed.

Monday morning…

The sun comes up at 5:45AM in Costa Rica so we were up bright and early Monday morning. One of our favorite things about Villa Toscana is the staff basically treats you like family. We sat on the patio and drank coffee until we were ready for our heuvos rancheros, which were… delicious.

Cesar, our car guy, arrived at Villa Toscana right on schedule at 9AM with our rental car, a well loved Honda Pilot with 150,000 kilometers on the odometer. Everything on the car is in working order. Cesar told us we need to keep our passports with us when driving because any traffic stop by the policia involves them needing to see your passport and immigration stamps. This conflicts with the online guidance that we just need to keep a picture of our passports with us. Hmmm… we will sort that out over time, but for now I guess we’ll keep our passports with us.

Once we had the rental car we set off for our new home in Costa Rica. The drive to the house was uneventful except that the last 400 yards is up a fairly rustic track that makes you happy you have a 4 wheel drive vehicle.

I’m pleased to report that the home exceeds expectations. Everything is as advertised. The photos don’t do the view justice. Mia Mosher, you will be happy to know that there are four full baths in the house, one more than advertised.

Also under the heading of Under-promise and Over-deliver, nice surprise was that Magda, the owner of the house, had upgraded the 10mb internet to fiber the day before. Once we got the wifi password sorted, I was able to verify that we were getting 40mb down and 8 mb up with 5ms ping times. That makes me one happy IT guy, as that should work great for Jill’s video counseling sessions. I’ll still have backup Internet plans in place, but that’s one floating anxiety down.

Probably our biggest culture shock of day one was the grocery store, La Coope. There were several points where I locked up due to both unfamiliarity and completely different offerings. Example, we eat a lot of yogurt. The yogurt in Costa Rica is primarily in liquid form. Think thick milk you pour over granola. The Greek yogurt revolution has not made it to Central America. It took us 2 trips to find salt, which was not by the spices but was in 2lb bags labeled “Sal”. So we need to add salt and pepper shakers to our acquisition list. All in all the grocery store was less intimidating after we’d been there for 30 minutes. Funniest thing that happened is that I was standing in front of the coffee beans trying to figure out which bag to put in our cart. I picked what looked like a good option and was putting it in my cart when a man tapped me on the shoulder shook his head disdainfully and handed me a different bag. Apparently I had chosen… poorly. I smiled and said “gracias” and he nodded never saying a word. And for reference, my annointed bag of coffee beans was 2000 colones (approximately $3.33). Yay, Costa Rica!

Pro-tip: The prices at La Coope are lower on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We assume that is to ensure that tourists pay full freight and locals get their discount. Jill learned that from a Canadian expat name Dale, who recognized new fish when she saw us. Dale also pointed Jill at a wine-in-a-box that she said was deceptively delicious. We went on a Monday and it was easy. Will report back when we go on a Saturday or Wednesday. I expect chaos.

For lunch we ate a roasted chicken that we picked up at La Coope.

While I was busy with IT and air conditioning systems familiarization, Jill was getting us settled in. We made a list of convenience items that we need to pick up for the house, which we will try to find at PriceSmart today. Things that apparently don’t exist in Costa Rica: liquid measuring cups (they have nesting measuring cups but not the beaker style with marks on the sides), ice trays, and kosher salt. Jill found time to make a fantastic pico de gallo while I was screwing around with my tasks.

We had our first of what I hope are many happy hours last night as the sun was going down. We bought gin at duty free in the San Jose airport and managed to find tonic at La Coope. Unfortunately I neglected to make sure we had ice and the ice maker was not turned on so we were limited to about 8 ancient ice cubes at the bottom of the icemaker. The icemaker is now on and we will continue looking for ice trays on our adventure today.

We had pico de gallo and chips plus yogurt and granola for dinner. I then started screwing around with getting our Amazon Firestick working. I failed due to poor wifi coverage. Poor wifi coverage in the back of the house is the only issue we are currently grappling with. We will resolve that by adding Google wifi devices when Jackie comes to visit. I was successful in getting the Firestick working in the upstairs TV room and verified that we’ve got access to all of the things we watch at home.

Final note on day one, as the sun set the lights came on in the valley. We expected this, as it’s one of the reasons we picked this location, but it was still amazing.

We were exhausted from a long productive day and fell into bed at 8:30. All in all not a bad day in the gulag.