Last night we discovered that our favorite pizza spot, Pizzeria la Finca, also has locally brewed craft beer. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but Non and D were delighted. My dad asked what kind of beer they had and our waiter brought a selection of their craft brews from the cooler along with four chilled beer schooners. Jill and I had not intended to drink beer, but we thought it was easier to just choose a beer from the array on offer since the nice man had already gone to the trouble of bringing out the chilled beer receptacles.

I would not have guessed that they would have craft beer in Atenas, but now we can now strike lack of good beer off of the possible concerns for those visiting us. 🙂

My parents left this morning, after a thoroughly enjoyable visit. Because of the timing of their departure, Jill and I had previously let our Spanish school know we wouldn’t be in attendance today.

The airport dropoff was uneventful. Since we were out and about anyway, Jill and I decided to swing by PriceSmart in Santa Ana to restock some essentials, namely Ritz Crackers and International Delight hazelnut coffee creamer.

Jill checked the PriceSmart hours and we had about 45 minutes to kill until PriceSmart opened. We decided to use that time to drive in toward San Jose, since we’d never actually laid eyes on San Jose (other than from the window of an airplane). We got on Ruta 27, the autobahn of Costa Rica, and headed east toward the suburbs of Santa Ana and Escazu, which are 13 and 10 kilometers from the San Jose city center respectively. It was all skittles and beer until we got to Escazu. Then our 100 km/hour road ground to a halt. We were caught in the morning crush of people heading in to work in San Jose.

The crawl of traffic allowed Jill to document evidence of the existence of PF Chang’s and Chili’s in the greater San Jose metropolitan area.

Jill and I finally crested the hilltop that let us see down into the valley to San Jose. We got close enough to confirm that San Jose is crowded and sprawling and also that the traffic in San Jose is worse than the traffic in Austin (and that’s no small feat). We declared our mission accomplished and headed back from whence we came to wait for PriceSmart to open.

I’m glad we were early to PriceSmart because otherwise we would not have spent the time in the ante-chamber that allowed us to discover this gem…

That got us both chuckling for the next few minutes.

Knowing that our guests were leaving today, Jill booked light client loads earlier this week with the intention of catching up today. So it’s a heavy day for her. We don’t have any more visitors scheduled for a while, so we have moved Jill’s office to the guest bedroom on the main floor of the house. The guest bedroom doesn’t have the view of the open air office upstairs, but there’s less chance of wind buffeting making it hard to hear her clients and it’s climate controlled to keep her cool on warm days.

We’ve called an audible in the last 24 hours and booked a trip to Playas del Coco in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. We have not been to that region yet and are excited to explore it.

Tomorrow at 10AM Cesar is meeting us at the airport location of Adobe, where we will drop off the Hyundai and transition to Cesar’s Honda CR-V. We are excited to be back in the fold with Cesar. We will leave for Playas del Coco straight from there. It’s about a 3 1/2 our trek. Fortunately I have Jill as a co-pilot, which makes the long-ish trip over unfamiliar roads a little less intimidating.

We will enjoy two nights at the beach and then head back here on Sunday afternoon. There will likely be no blog updates until we return to HQ.

Between Spanish school and having my parents here it’s been a busy few days, which haven’t left much time for blogging.

On the Spanish school front, Jill and I finally received Libro Dos (Book 2). The joy of receiving our intermediate books was quickly put into check as Profesora Ana quized us on past-tense of the Big 5 verbs. It was ugly, almost like we’d never seen those verbs before. We’ve since redoubled our efforts on the Big 5 verbos and have done better on subsequent reviews.

Jill re-swizzled her schedule on Monday so that she only had one client in the evening, giving us a bonus afternoon together. For lunch on Monday we took Non and D to La Fiesta de las Pupusas. We can add two more pupusa fans to the growing list.

Monday’s dinner was our inaugural InstantPot meal in Costa Rica. I made Chicken Adobo. A funny thing happened at La Coope when we went to buy the chicken thighs for the Chicken Adobo. We went to the butcher counter and asked for a kilo of chicken thighs (we forgot to look up the word for thigh so Jill said “pollo” and pointed to her thigh and said “uno kilo”) and the nice man pulled out a kilo worth of chicken thighs with drumsticks still attached. We told him we just wanted the thighs with no drumsticks and he was not amused. Apparently one does not buy stand-alone chicken thighs in Costa Rica. Properly chastened, we took our kilo of thighs and drumsticks to the checkout.

My parents had not experienced the singularity of joy that is the InstantPot before. I used the preparation of the meal as an infomercial. I think they are sold.

The Chicken Adobo was well received by Non and D. According to Non, she had never had Chicken Adobo before. Mia Mosher, I’m not sure how that’s possible.

On Tuesday morning we got to Spanish class ready to dive into book number two in earnest. But when Profesora Maria arrived she was clearly not her normal self. We asked her what was wrong and she told us that her Abuelita was “muriendo”. I wasn’t sure whether that meant her grandmother was dying or had just died. Fortunately, Jill understood that it meant she was dying, saving me from asking a blundering question and making a bad situation worse. Instead of tackling Spanish, the three of us spend the time talking about family and the emotions that go along with loss. It was a proud moment for me to watch Jill put her therapy skills to work in Spanish.

Jill had a busy afternoon of seeing clients yesterday and I took Non and D to the El Toledo coffee plantation tour. I’d already done that tour with Jill’s parents and have met and chatted with Gabriel, the gentleman who runs the operation, at the Atenas farmer’s market. I was looking forward to going back with my parents.

Gabriel did not disappoint. Unfortunately Jill has yet to be able to go with me to the tour, but we will pick a time to go because she will love it. The tour costs $20 per person and you pay at the end. When we went to pay for the three of us, Gabriel said there was no need to pay for me because I’d already paid for the tour the last time and I can come back as many times as I want for free. I think I’ve made this point a couple of times previously, but it bears repeating that we have found Costa Rica to be a place where people joyfully share their talents and time and it’s not necessarily transactional even in a commercial endeavor. I find this extremely refreshing.

Last night was an event that is well outside of my comfort zone. We had SALSA DANCING LESSONS! Our landlord Magda pinged us a couple of weeks ago and asked if we would be interested in Salsa dancing lessons. We relayed to my parents and they said they were in, so we signed up. We had no idea what to expect other than we were to show up at 5PM last night at Magda’s restaurant. We learned some very basic steps from an extremely talented young couple. It’s good that the steps were very basic because I was at the limit of my abilities.

Following the lesson we had a nice evening with Magda and her sister who is also visiting from California. I think everyone had fun.

This morning we got up as normal and headed off to Spanish school. Profesora Ana relayed the sad news that Profesora Maria’s grandmother passed away overnight. We had a bit of conversation with Profesora Ana about Maria and about how death is handled in the Costa Rican culture. We asked about the funeral arrangements and were surprised to learn that the funeral was at 10AM today. Profesora Ana told us that unless death occurs in the evening or family is coming from a long distance, the funeral is always held on the day of death.

We came home from Spanish class and loaded Non and D into the car to take them for a special lunch. Kay’s here in Atenas is run by a lady from Poland (by way of Canada) and she serves Polish comfort food. I had cabbage rolls and my dad had pierogi. Anya, the owner, came over and chatted with D and he trotted out his best Polish greeting. While D was chatting with Anya, an expat gentleman at the next table over literally pulled his chair over between me and Jill uninvited and proceeded to talk our ears off until our food arrived, whereupon he returned to his own table. Once we finished our food, the expat gentleman was right back between me and Jill. We have found that some expats are exceptionally forward to the point of being pushy and nosy. Following lunch we took Non and D on a tour of El Mercado and finished up a Pops for some ice cream!

Non and D fly out in the morning. Jill and I took the day off of Spanish to take them to the airport. We’ve got one more dinner before they go. Debating Pizzeria la Finca vs. La Trocha (our friend Frank’s restaurant).

Today’s bonus photo:

Attention blog followers: Regular updates will resume tomorrow.

My parents arrived safely last night. They flew from Monterrey to Los Angeles on Friday and then from LAX to SJO yesterday. Jill and I take for granted that Costa Rica is an easy flight from Texas, being just 3 1/2 hours from Houston to SJO. Getting here from California is a real hike. It’s a full six hours from LAX. We appreciate the commitment that Non and D showed to getting here. And they arrived bearing a gift!

When they arrived in Los Angeles they read the post about us needing an InstantPot and they Uber-ed all over Hell’s half acre to procure us one. And then they went through the nightmare of checking it as luggage, including needing to find an additional box to pack the retail box in because the airline required that. Needless to say Jill and I are delighted!

As a bonus, Non and D re-supplied us with Duty Free gin on their way through the San Jose airport. It’s feeling a little like Christmas in Costa Rica!

Airport ingress and egress went without a hitch (Jill and I are feeling like professionals in that area) and we were back at headquarters with InstantPot and parents by 9:15PM. We gave Non and D a tour of our shanty and then retired to the salon and broke out a plate of our coveted Ritz Crackers and sharp cheddar cheese plus a box of La Coope’s fines Chilean Cabernet. We spent about an hour catching up and then everyone retired for the evening.

Everyone was up early this morning and we had coffee and cheese omelettes to get the day started.

Today’s destination was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, which we’d previously enjoyed with Jill’s parents when they were here. This was our second time making the drive and it was not nearly as nerve-wracking because Jill and I knew what to expect. We are really hitting our stride as a driver-navigator team.

La Paz did not disappoint and continues to be one of our favorite day trips.

Once we arrived at La Paz we rushed straight for the colibri (hummingbird) garden because there are only two times during the day when they let you feed the hummingbirds by hand. We arrived as the curator of the hummingbirds was packing away the little vials you hold in your hand to feed the hummingbirds. Like all but one other person we’ve encountered in Costa Rica (yeah I’m talking about you, Adobe Rent-A-Car guy), the nice man went out of his way to accommodate us. He gave Jill, Non, and D each a vial of nectar and stood patiently by while they made like giant flowers.

The last time we went to the La Paz Waterfall Gardens it was cloudy and misting rain, which meant the butterflies in the butterfly garden were pretty listless. Today was a bright sunny day and the butterflies were out in force.

After the butterflies we went to see the rescued two-toed sloths, which happened to be very active this morning.

Then it was on to the tucanes (toucans)!

Then we were off to the headline attraction, the cataratas (waterfalls)!

Here’s something you don’t often see: D on a bridge high above a rocky river gorge.

After the waterfalls we had all worked up and appetite so we popped into the restaurant for lunch. Jill and I became fans of chifrijo on our last trip to La Paz so we talked Non and D into getting chifrijo as well. Everyone LOVED their lunch.

After a nice lunch we went back to the hummingbird garden one more time and then saddled up for the ride home.

The La Paz area is known for its berry farms so we stopped on the return journey and bought a caja de fresas (box of strawberries). We did taste them until we got home. If we had we would have known to buy 10 boxes. Holy cow, these strawberries are life changing!

Everyone but me is now napping. Non and D are still on Pacific time and Jill had a stressful day of navigating us to and from the Cataratas de La Paz. I suspect as soon as they wake up we will begin discussing dinner options. I need to make a list of the ingredients I need for Chicken Adobo 🙂

Today’s bonus photo:

Jill and I were lounging around on Thursday afternoon lamenting that the volcano ash cloud had obscured our fantastic view for the better part of a week. We were also a little bored. I correctly diagnosed that we were exhibiting all of the signs of cabin fever so we set out to find a fun impromptu road trip. Our only constraint was that we needed to be back in time to pick up Non and D when their flight arrives tonight.

Since we had not yet laid eyes on the ocean this trip, we picked the beach town of Jaco as our destination. Jaco is only an hour from our house. It was surprisingly hard to find a hotel room in Jaco on short notice. So much so that we almost gave up on the mission. There are a number of super cute hotels with 6-10 rooms right on the beach where rooms are $60 to $70 a night, but those were all booked up. When we go back we are going to plan a little further in advance and stay at Hotel Perico Azul. We ended up finding a room at a larger hotel, the Oceano, about a half a mile inland for $200 including breakfast — and we would also happily stay there again.

Friday morning, we were up with the sun and had a leisurely breakfast and coffee. We threw together a change of clothes and our swimsuits and we were off! Because it’s all shorts and flip flops, the two of us were able to pack for one night in a single backpack.

We stopped on the way out of town to gas up.

The drive to Jaco was super easy. We took the magical Ruta 27 (the autobahn like toll road) in the opposite direction that we’d taken to get to the PriceSmart of the future earlier in the week.

One of the neat sights on the way to Jaco is the bridge over the Tarcoles River. The Tarcoles River is home to a very healthy population of fresh water crocodiles (not caymans).

With the stop to gawk at the crocs at Tarcoles we were at the overlook for Jaco Beach in about an hour an fifteen minutes.

We had no trouble finding the Oceano Boutique Hotel. The staff were super nice. We got there at 10:00, knowing check-in wasn’t until 3:00 so we changed into our swimsuits, loaded up on sunscreen, and headed for the beach straight away. The nice lady at the desk also said our room would likely be available before the official check in time.

We walked the whole beach at low tide and by then we were getting hungry. Jill found a great lunch place right on the beach called El Malecon.

A very common item on menus in Costa Rica is “Hamburguesa de Pescado” (fish burger). It’s generally a breaded fresh fish fillet on a fresh bun with some variation of cabbage and carrot slaw. El Malecon serves up a mean Hamburguesa de Pescado. We chatted in Spanish with Eduardo, our camarero (waiter) and made it through the entire experience without speaking English to him. Pequena victoria!

A thing to note about Jaco is that as long as you are on the beach or in the shade the temperature is very pleasant. If you find yourself a block or two inland in the sun you will be sweltering. After lunch we decided to head back to the Oceano via the shops along Jaco’s main drag.

A thing you may not know about Jill is that she finds a small inexpensive keepsake from every new place we visit (think refrigerator magnet, photo frame, etc.). A universal truth that I’ve found about souvenir stores in the tropics is that they are claustrophobic and un-airconditioned. Just because the keepsakes are small and inexpensive does not mean that the process to acquire these keepsakes is not exhaustive. The general order of operations is:

1. We visit every un-airconditioned souvenir shop we can find
2. Jill examines the wares while I swelter and try not to knock things over
3. Jill asks me to read the price tag on the bottom of the items while I swelter and try not to knock things over
4. Jill chats with the shop owner while I swelter and try not to knock things over
5. Unable to make a decision we withdraw, pledging to return later
6. Sometime later, after I am cleaned up, we return to make the actual purchase – whereupon I commence anew sweltering and trying not to knock things over
7. Jill makes her final decision and says (this is very important) “Please pay the lady”

We’ve completed this ritual all over the world and, while my grumbling about it is part of the ritual, I admit that I probably get as much joy as Jill does when I see these tiny treasures at home and they remind me of our adventures.

All of that is to say we completed Steps 1 – 5 above on our way back to the Oceano, where we took up our positions in repose by the pool.

We had such a fun and relaxing time at the pool at the Oceano that when the nice lady came out to tell us our room was ready we didn’t feel any compelling need to go upstairs. Plus, they kept bringing me coconuts full of rum…

We lounged by the pool until the heat of day broke, whereupon we adjourned to our room and got cleaned up for dinner.

We strolled back to the beach, stopping along the way to admire some street art and complete Steps 6 and 7 above.

Peak surfing yesterday must have been sometime around 5PM, because when we got to the beach to watch the sunset there were literally hundreds of surfers spread out across the full expanse of the beach. We watched them for a quite a while and some of them were REALLY good.

Dinner last night was at Ohana Sushi y Tapas. Trip Advisor said it was the number one spot in Jaco. Trip Advisor under promised. We fell in love with Ohana. The food was off the charts good and we made friends with Ignacio, the bartender, and Ryan, the manager. Ignacio is from Buenos Aires and Ryan is from San Diego. Rich Mosher will appreciate that Ryan is a big fan of Roberto’s and our experience with it gave us instant cred with Ryan 🙂

We had a combination of sushi and tapas and every bite was delicious. I could do a full review here, but our plan is to go back several more times during this trip so I’ll plan to cover more later.

We woke up this morning, enjoyed the complimentary breakfast at our hotel, then walked to the beach to get our toes wet one more time before we headed back to headquarters.

Because we were already afield, we decided to drive to the port town of Puntarenas (Sandy Point) on the way home. It’s where the cruise ships dock on the Pacific side. We’ve never heard anyone say one word about Puntarenas. Now we know why. Puntarenas is a long sand spit with cranes for offloading container ships and a dock for cruise ships. We don’t need to go back, unless we want to catch a car ferry to the Nicoya Peninsula.

We are back at HQ and will head to pick up Non and D in a couple of hours.

Final note: When we first came through Jaco on our way to Manuel Antonio this past October, our impression was that it was a gritty little town that was probably not for us. We’ve revised that opinion. There are indisputably a ton of bedraggled surfers who look a bit dusty and grimy out of the water, but they’re just killing time until it’s time to surf. When the waves start breaking they all head for the beach however they can get there. One of the more jaw dropping things we saw was surfers riding their bicycles or motorcycles with surfboards under their arms. The surfers seem to be a communal bunch, hanging out in clumps on the beach or at the taco places in town. I’ve come to the conclusion that they are all just trying to make whatever money they have last as long as possible so they can keep surfing. It was exceptionally cool watching all of them as the sun was going down behind them last night. We will happily go back to Jaco in the future and we will definitely eat at Ohana every chance we get.

Today marked the end of our fourth week of Spanish lessons (three full weeks plus an abbreviated first week). The structure of our instruction has gradually changed as we become more competent in the basics. When we started we were getting three hours of hard core instruction each day and we were pretty well cooked by the time class ended at 11AM. The intensive instruction phase also made it challenging for Jill to come home and quickly transition to Therapy Jill for a 12PM or 1PM client.

Over the last week or so, our Profesoras have decided we are now competent enough with the basics to evolve the structure of the class. From 8AM to 10AM each day we still have hard core instruction, but then from 10AM to 11AM our Profesoras pick a topic and we just converse. Each time we stumble in the conversation Profesora Ana will write the word or phrase we stumbled over on the white board, then with a few minutes left in class we will review the things on the whiteboard before we are dismissed. The conversations are going well enough that Jill and I now leave class at 11AM feeling successful and engergized. That’s preferable to overwhelmed.

By the end of the instruction portion of today’s class we were within 2 pages of the end of our initial Spanish book. Sometime Monday we will move on to book #2. There have been a number of topics that we have asked about over the last several weeks where our Profesoras have told us that would be in book #2. As a result, we are both anxious to get our hands on the new book. The big goal for me is to master my use of prepositions and connectors, which are supposedly early in book #2.

I may have mentioned this previously, but Jill is way ahead of me in terms of getting comfortable speaking in complete sentences in Spanish. Jill is totally fearless and if she needs 5 simple sentences to get her point across she picks her verbs and starts talking. I have not yet mastered the art of simple sentences. My head is a crowded noisy place. I spend a whole bunch of extra time tongue-tied because I am trying to make beautiful flowery sentences that I don’t yet have the words for. Almost invariably, our Profesora will finally grasp the point I am trying to make and remind me of words that we already have in our vocabulary that communicate my point succinctly. I’m hopeful that sometime soon I will start thinking in Spanish verbs instead of English ones, because I think that’s where I’m tying my own shoelaces together. Poco a poco.

A funny thing happened yesterday during our discussion hour with Profesora Ana. She was describing how pressure cookers (called “ollas”) are the implement of choice in a lot of traditional Costa Rican recipes and that she has a love/hate relationship with her pressure cooker. It allows her to cook things quickly, but when full and scalding hot, the weight is hard for her to get it from the stove to the sink so that she can run it under water to release the pressure. And she never knows until she’s got it up to temperature whether the o-ring is sealed right. Then she started to describe this thing she’d heard about but never seen called an “olla programmable.” The penny dropped for both me and Jill at the same time. We realized she was talking about an InstantPot! If you know me, you know I love me some InstantPot. I got super excited and told Profesora Ana that the InstantPot is indeed life-altering and magic. She said that her daughter-in-law in the United States has one and raves about it, but that she cannot find one in Costa Rica. Jill and I resolved in that moment to bring an InstantPot back to Costa Rica when we come back from our intermission in March. We will use it for the rest of our visit and then leave it with Profesora Ana as a parting gift. Because I wasn’t sure whether the manual in the InstantPot box includes Spanish instructions, I downloaded the Spanish language manual from the InstantPot website and sent it to Profesora Ana. She totally geeked out on the manual 🙂 In a million years I would not have guessed that I would be blogging about having a stimulating conversation in Spanish about an InstantPot.

We get a 15 minute break each morning at 9:30. Jill and I enjoy exploring the grounds of the school during our break..

Jill had a touch of homesickness yesterday, just a few days shy of the four week mark. Jill has done a nice job of putting up our favorite photos around the house and we are definitely not living out of suitcases, but there’s no denying that this is not OUR house. I’m thinking that having an InstantPot here will help. I can make Jill my Chicken Adobo whenever she’s homesick. I’m fairly certain that Chicken Adobo is second only to golden retriever puppies in its ability to provide comfort.

We took a walk down our hill late yesterday afternoon. Being in and around the beautiful flora helps also with homesickness.

It’s Thursday or as we say in Costa Rica… Hoy es el Jueves.

And everybody knows: If it’s Jueves, it’s date night!

Jill and I are creative problem solvers. If necessary we can make a memorable date night out of a frozen pizza and a box of wine at home. Tonight we are going the more conventional route and trying a new restaurant in Atenas. Review to follow.

Jill felt her first pangs of home-sickness today, so I’m having a nice afternoon connecting with my lovely wife. That’s more important than blogging today…

The ash cloud seemed to be somewhat reduced this morning.

Both Profesora Ana and Profesora Maria use the phrase “poco a poco” (little by little) at the moments when Jill and I are not sure we are actually making incremental progress in our endeavor to learn Spanish. I heard “poco a poco” multiple times today from Profesora Maria.

We continue to focus on past-tense in our classes. Today’s exercise was to take a scene depicted on a laminated card and make up a story in past tense about what was going on in the scene. Each laminated card has vocabulary words listed on it and before we make up the story we go through the vocabulary words to make sure we know what they mean. Profesora Maria does not speak English to us, which makes for some interesting pantomime when we get to a vocabulary word neither of us can recall.

After we finished the vocabulary we set out on making up our stories. Jill killed it. I really struggle at this exercise. For the second time in as many tries I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I can conjugate the verb in past-tense, but struggle mightily with predicates and connectors like “por eso” (because) and “sin embargo” (nevertheless) and also with the various prepositions such as “a,” “de,” “en,” and “con.” For example, when trying to form the sentence “The children played on the slide in the park.” I get as far as “Los ninos jugaron” (The children played) and then get stuck on prepositions. In reality, it’s actually simpler in Spanish than English because “en” in Spanish is both “in” and “on” in English, but my brain currently locks up at that point. Poco a poco.

Jill made an observation today that totally rings true for me. As we are trying to figure out how to say things in Spanish, we are both involuntarily simplifying the sentence structure of our own internal monologue, trying to dumb it down to sentences we can say in Spanish. And that, in turn, makes us feel a little more infantile on the whole.

For the next two weeks on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we will have Profesora Maria for the first two hours of our lesson and then Profesora Ana will take over for the last hour. Today when we transitioned to Profesora Ana, we put away the libros (books) and just talked. I am pleased to report that we had a full hour of stimulating conversation in Spanish where we discussed a broad range of intriguing topics.

We learned that Profesora Ana retired from a career working for Copa Airlines (the national airline of Panama). She loves Costa Rica, but thinks Panama has the brightest future in Central America, largely because the revenue from the canals and ship flagging is a major and predictable source of income for the government. Her position is that since the Panamanian government has a commerce driven revenue stream with a clear accounting trail, there is less opportunity for the kind of graft and corruption that plagues other Central American countries. She also pointed out that Panama is a free trade zone where Costa Rica relies on import duties of up to 75% that crimp demand and put modern conveniences out of reach of people of modest means.

Side note: The impact of Costa Rica’s import duties is real and visible. Because our house doesn’t have a microwave, Jill and I looked at counter-top microwave ovens at PriceSmart and the starting price is $200, compared to $65 at your local Target in the US. We decided to pass. A decent used car in Costa Rica is 2x what it costs in the US.

We also learned that family farms in Costa Rica are suffering from a labor shortage because farming families have been successful getting the younger generation to take education seriously and the adult children are heading off in search of jobs that a university education has opened up to them. To fill the farm labor needs in Costa Rica farmers rely on migrant Nicaraguan laborers who send money back to their families in Nicaragua.

We also touched on the economic situation in Costa Rica and Profesora Ana is gravely concerned about the shrinking middle class in Costa Rica. I’ll have to fact check this, but according to Profesora Ana poverty rates in Costa Rica have doubled from 15% to 30% and continue climbing, increasing the need for social assistance programs and eroding the tax base of the country.

It was thoroughly gratifying to hear and be able to understand Profesora Ana’s well-reasoned arguments and opinions and to be able to compare and contrast our personal experience in our home country, all in Spanish. Poco a poco!

As the day wears on the ash haze is re-asserting itself. I wonder if it causes some sort of inversion layer around San Jose and the traffic exhaust accumulates during the day?

Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon for today.

One of the early mysteries of our stay in Costa Rica was an extremely loud chirping that occurs at around dawn and dusk. We thought it was a bird but we could never find the bird making the noise. We also thought, with some trepidation that it might be a frog. We were really hoping it wasn’t a frog because we have one upcoming house guest who is deathly afraid of frogs. Jill’s dad solved the mystery when they where here. He went searching on the Internet for animal calls until he found the one that matched. The super loud chirping noise comes from a tiny lizard that is native to Asia, but has arrived in Costa Rica on-board ships and flourished here.

Over the last few days, both the Poas and Turrialba volcanoes have been spewing ash. The effect is a little bit eerie, but it makes for some fantastic sunrises.

Once the sun is up the ash is indistinguishable from smog. It makes everything look hazy. The only official notice we have seen has been a PSA warning pet owners to give their outdoor pets fresh water frequently so that the water is not contaminated with ash. I’m guessing that ash falling in water will create a little bit of sulfuric acid?

So far the ash has not affected flight operations at Juan Santamaria Internation airport. We’d like to keep it that was because Non and D fly in on Saturday evening.

We had a good day at Spanish school today. Today’s class was mainly us telling Profesora Ana in past tense what we did this weekend. I managed to recount my failed car rental experience to the degree that she was crestfallen when I got to the part where I forgot my driver’s license. And Jill told the story of the frozen box of wine at Frank’s restaurant.

We found ourselves with a bit of a logistical challenge today. One of the challenges we have set for ourselves is to get our taxes filed without an extension while we are in Costa Rica. We managed to get all of our tax filing documents to our accountant in Austin earlier this week and she got our taxes done this morning and emailed us a couple of documents to print, sign, and scan. As we don’t currently have a printer at our rental house, I took my computer to Spanish school hoping to use their printer. Profesora Ana made me explain to Juan Diego (the owner of our Spanish school) what I needed to do in Spanish 🙂 For reasons I can respect, Juan Diego didn’t seem to be a fan of me connecting my laptop to their network. We had a little back and forth about how I could get him the documents. He asked if I could email them to him and I held up a USB flash drive. He knew what it was, but he asked me what it was called in English. He was delighted to learn from me that we call it either a “thumb drive” or a “USB flash drive.” In Costa Rica they call it a “llave Maya” (literally a Mayan key). Fascinating.

I dropped the documents on the flash drive and we went on with class. A few minutes later Juan Diego brought back the paper copies for me and Jill to sign and then he took those back to his office to scan and we picked up the originals and the scans as we were leaving school. Our accountant now has our signatures and our tax returns have been filed!

Jill only has one client tonight, from 6:30-7:30, so we had pretty much the whole day together. We took a two hour walk, exploring our neighborhood. Costa Rica never disappoints on the flora front. Pictures below are all from our walk today, just random trees and shrubs growing wild.

We had a great time with Jackie this weekend, but we slacked off on our Spanish flash cards while she was here. We made up for that this afternoon following our walk. Jill is the keeper of the flashcards and she adds to the pile with each word that we miss in class. I think we are up to about 600 flashcards at this point so it takes a good 2 hours to get through them.

Jill made some of her delicious pico de gallo for our afternoon snack while I labored over a local Costa Rican staple called gallo pinto. It’s a dish of black beans, rice, red peppers, onion, garlic and salsa. Jill and I like it with a poached egg on top. We got bonus cred with Profesora Ana when I shared my gallo pinto recipe with her 🙂

We’ve got a full moon tonight. The moon just appeared above the ash cloud.

Jill should wrap up her evening client session in the next few minutes. I’m to have chamomile tea and biscuits ready for her when she comes down 🙂

We had a relatively sedate Sunday. Update forthcoming manana.