Last night we took Jackie to Pizzeria La Finca. It took us a little while to get there. Atenas is a bit of one-horse town and apparently at 5:30PM on a Friday the traffic system is overloaded.

We made the most of our 5 minute delay by giggling at the road signs.

A thing that is common here is to have a 4″ PVC pipe on the top of your vehicle. We couldn’t figure out what that was for so we asked Cesar yesterday and he told us that it’s a water supply on the go. Sure enough when we looked more closely the next one we saw, it had a hose bib on one end. I assume they are black because they are coated with something to prevent the sunlight from breaking down the PVC?

At any rate, we made it to Pizzeria la Finca by about 5:50PM. The Friday 5PM ex-pat Happy Hour was as advertised and made for some great people watching. There was one long table with maybe 35 Americans and Canadians – median age maybe 75. The men seemed to be wearing a consistent uniform of some sort of logo t-shirt (I saw several Imperial beer t-shirts), khaki cargo shorts, and Teva-style orthopedic sandals with black crew length socks (except for the men who were wearing knee high compression socks to prevent thrombosis). The ladies were wearing what I think were called moo-moos back in the 1970s. Everyone seemed to be in a great mood and there was a great deal of laughter and camaraderie. They were finishing up their meal as we sat down at our table. Several of the people at that table were on the El Toledo coffee plantation tour I did with Jill’s parents this past Tuesday.

Our waiter was a guy named Max and he asked if we’d like to start with a glass of wine. Jill and I replied in Spanish that we’d like a bottle of whatever vino tinto they had on special. Max raised his eyebrows and said “You’re sure?” That should have been a tip-off, but, as I’ve said previously, it’s easy to get out over your skis when you’re doing live-fire exercises in a new language. We said “Yes, bring the bottle please.” Next thing we knew Max was delivering us a giant bottle of wine. .

Because we had a bunch of wine to drink and I was driving we tarried over a very pleasant dinner. After dinner we played three handed gin rummy and then shared a piece of tres leches cake with a passion-fruit glaze. Sounds odd, but it was delicious!

We’ve been telling Jackie about our new friend Frank and his restaurant. We are going to Frank’s place, La Trocha, for dinner tonight. I had a WhatsApp conversation with Frank in Spanish to secure us a slot tonight. Only after I pored over it when I got home did I realize he had asked me if we wanted the same wine we had last time or something “special”. I followed up with him this morning and told him we loved the wine we had last time. Jill and I get so tickled when we are able to have simple transactional conversations in Spanish!

This morning may have been the best sunrise yet. Credit to Jill for retrieving her phone from the kitchen to capture it.

Jill and I had coffee on the upper patio so that we wouldn’t wake Jackie (who has not been going to bed at 8:30PM for the last three weeks). I’ve been watering the potted plants on the upper deck every day and am now being rewarded by a very happy amaryllis.

As you may recall from yesterday, I forgot my physical driver’s license when we picked up our new rental car. For that reason, the first think on the docket today after breakfast was to drive to Grecia to present my license and get me officially added as a driver to the rental car.

I drove 45 minutes from Atenas to Grecia and then we swapped seats so that Jill could drive the last 200 meters, just in case they saw us drive up. It turns out that the swap wasn’t necessary because the Grecia branch of Adobe rental car is housed within the back office of an oil change shop and no one could see us from the office. Jill waited in the car and I went in, driver’s license and passport in hand. I had to wait behind one other patron and when it was my turn I told the nice man that I had forgotten my physical license yesterday and the person at the airport location insisted that I present my physical license so that I could become an authorized driver of the vehicle. He laughed and shook his head. I didn’t catch every word of what he said, but it approximated “I have no use for those people at the airport. You are certainly authorized to drive the car as you are the person whose name the car was rented under. In fact, in Costa Rica, the insurance goes with the car. If the car is insured any licensed driver can drive it. The real reason you should keep your physical license on your person is that the police may not accept a paper copy if they stop you and they are having a bad day.” He did go ahead and enter into their computer system that he had indeed held my physical drivers license in his hand. In summary, if you absolutely have to do business with Adobe Car Rental in Grecia, the guy who works the Grecia location is who you want to deal with. I thanked the man, hopped into the driver’s seat with renewed authority, and we were on our way back to our shanty!

We’ve seen many a traffic sign that has us scratching our head. Take the sign below. What would you guess that it means? Our best guess is that it shows the viable paths through the intersection. That mostly holds up in practice, but not always…

It is also common to see a stop sign at an intersection that also has a traffic light. What would you do if you were approaching an intersection with a green light in your lane of travel, but a stop sign at the intersection?

We are learning new things every day and having a lot of fun doing it. Even the unnecessary trip to Grecia was fun and educational. For example, there is a one mile stretch of road in Grecia that is lined with a bunch of used car lots. Each lot has maybe 4-10 vehicles. Fascinating. If we ever need to buy a used car in Costa Rica we now know where to go!

This morning we had to meet our car guy, Cesar, in San Ramon to turn in our Honda Pilot. Cesar is a great guy. He owns a fleet of 7 rental cars and keeps them all in good shape, charges a reasonable rate, and is all about customer service. He brought the Pilot to our hotel on our first morning in Atenas and he’s texted me via WhatsApp every few days to make sure the car is working well for us. Because Cesar’s fleet is small there were two weeks during our 3 month trip where all of his cars were already spoken for at the time we booked with him. As a result of that, we had to rent a car from Adobe from February 15 through March 1. We were in the car at 7:15AM headed for our rendezvous with Cesar.

True to form, Cesar was waiting for us in San Ramon, where we topped the Pilot off with gas and handed him the keys. He then drove us to the Adobe location by the airport in Alajuela.

Things went a little sideways once we started check-in at Adobe to pick up our Hyundai Tucson. We had remembered to bring the physical copies of our passports, but we only had a paper copy of my driver’s license. We made scans of our passports and driver’s licenses to keep in the glove box of the rental cars. My physical driver’s license was back in the safe storage stash at the house. Fortunately Jill had her physical driver’s license on her. The guy at Adobe was the anti-Cesar. He was holding Jill’s physical drivers license in his hand and I showed him a the scan of both my driver’s license and Jill’s (which perfectly matched the one he had in his hand) side by side on the same page. He was steadfast in his refusal to authorize me (even provisionally) as a driver on the car based on the exceptionally high-resolution color facsimile of my driver’s license. It was clearly my fault for forgetting the physical copy of my license, but I have to say that this was literally the first aggressively unhelpful person we have come across in Costa Rica.

Keep in mind that in the agreed upon separation of duties for this adventure, I am the driver and Jill is the navigator. I promised Jill I would not make her drive in Costa Rica. In the end, we took possession of a Hyundai Tuscon from Adobe with Jill as the only authorized driver. She drove it off the lot, pulled over in the first available parking space, and I got behind the wheel. Sometime tomorrow we will make the 45 minute drive to the Adobe office in Grecia and show them my physical driver’s license to get me added as an authorized driver. Also, to add insult to injury, the 2 week car rental with Adobe is $1,352, where as the car rental with Cesar for the other 2 1/2 months of our trip is $2,500. Needless to say, we will be happy to see Cesar when he picks us up at Adobe on March 1!

On our drive back to our house from the Adobe office we got to experience our first toll road. We got on Ruta 1, which is effectively the big daddy highway in San Jose metropolitan area and we couldn’t figure out why we were in bumper to bumper traffic heading out of town at 9:15 on a Friday morning. Then we started seeing some weird stuff. There were street vendors walking between the cars.

After about 10 minutes inching through the gridlock (and trying on, but deciding not to buy some Terminator-style Oakley knockoffs) we saw that we were in a giant disorganized queue to pay the toll for the toll road. That was our first indication we were on a toll road. We had been keeping a little plastic box of change in the glove box for just this eventuality! We squinted into the glare to see if we could figure out which lane we needed to be in and what the toll amount was. Pro-tip: If you don’t have a toll-tag in Costa Rica you need to be in the toll booth lane that says “Manual”. Urban lore says you don’t want to end up in the toll-tag lane with no toll-tag. We successfully bobbed-and-weaved our way through the street vendors to get to the correct toll booth. Our toll was 100 Colones and we paid in exact change!

For those of you keeping score at home, 100 Colones at today’s exchange rate is $0.16. I figure that the attractive receipt they give you eats up about 50% of the toll cost. So how exactly are they making money on this particular toll road? The street vendors however were cleaning up in the 10 minute buffer zone to pay the $0.16 toll. That experience was comical enough that it lightened my sour mood from the Adobe fiasco. We made it home with no further incident.

Today’s big adventure was to do a trial run to the Brigadoon of PriceSmarts in Santa Ana. We all piled into the Hyundai and set off. The Waze lady guided us unerringly to our target. Ironically this route was on Costa Rica’s newest highway, Ruta 27. Ruta 27 between Atenas and Santa Ana is 15 miles of buttery smooth, broad shouldered highway. Just as Profesora Maria foretold we were flying along at speeds of 100 kilometers per hour. Right up til we ran into… toll booths! The amounts of these tolls seemed to be a little more appropriate. We paid two tolls on Ruta 27 totaling 1000 colones each way. After almost 3 weeks of tooling along over hill and dale at 25 mph it was worth $3.25 to drive 30 miles at 62 mph! 🙂 In all seriousness, we continue to marvel at the landscapes and countryside in Costa Rica, which makes tooling along at a stately 25 mph plenty enjoyable.

The Santa Ana PriceSmart was clearly from the rocket car future. The store is built over the parking structure and there’s a moving sidewalk that takes you up from the parking area to the store. It’s all very reminiscent of the Whole Foods mothership in downtown Austin. We bought flavored coffee creamer, wine, cheese, crackers, and a roasted chicken… and we restocked our supply of frozen pepperoni pizzas. And most importantly we executed the checkout process flawlessly! Jill seems to have cracked the code. She flashed a credit card at our cashier at the same time he scanned our membership card so he knew in advance that we were paying by card. The reason I know we nailed it is that this is the first time they haven’t taken my card from my hand to insert it in the chip reader. Our guy just gave me the nod and I inserted the card myself. Victoria pequena!

I may or may not have had a little blood sugar issue on the drive back from PriceSmart, but Jill and Jackie gave me a Coke and a pineapple empanada and I was right back in the game.

Magda and her niece came up this afternoon to sort out the AirBNB situation. I feel like we made progress, but Magda forgot to bring her bank account information. That was the whole point of the exercise so I’m not sure how they thought we were going to move the ball forward without it. I showed them where to put the info in on the AirBNB site, but I have a feeling they’ll be back at some point. We also pointed out some errors in the listing that, if fixed, should result in them getting more bookings. The prime example is that the 3 bedroom, 4 bath house has been listed as a “Studio.” There’s definitely some family drama going on there, but we stayed above the fray and made some measurable progress. At no point did a Nigerian prince come up.

We are taking Jackie to Pizzeria la Finca for dinner tonight. We’ve heard that Friday night is the night that expats gather at Pizzeria La Finca. In our limited experience the average age of the expat community in Atenas is about 20 years older than we are. We will report back.

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.

The volcano Poas has been having minor rumblings for the last few days, letting off sulfuric steam. Poas sits in one of Costa Rica’s many national parks. We were thinking about taking Jill’s parents to see Poas late last week, but it’s a longish drive and they (appropriately) close the park with no notice if the volcano is showing any activity. If Poas really gets going it can affect air traffic, as sulfuric acid and silica are not good for jet engines. The recent activity didn’t do anything more than create a cloud layer that made it hard to see the mountains/volcanos last night. It was kind of neat in an Eye of Sauron kind of way.

We were up extra early this morning to get Jill’s parents to the airport.

Jill and I mastered the Arrivals logistics at the airport last week. This was our first time to do Departures. One of the things about Costa Rica that’s generally nice is that they don’t have big gaudy signs cluttering up the roadways. But it wouldn’t hurt them to make the signs at the airport just a little bigger.

Sign complaints not withstanding, we figured out how to deposit Jill’s parents in the right spot and they promptly texted us that they were through security.

We declared victory at the airport and headed off to the Parque Central of Alajuela to meet Profesora Ana for another field trip. We found the pay-to-park lot behind Pops (the chain of ice cream shop that appears to have a strangle hold on the Costa Rican market). I parked and correctly deciphered that I needed to go to the booth where the attendant was reading the periodico (newspaper). She looked up from her paper, jotted down the number of my parking space, and gave me a time stamped ticket.

We did not eat breakfast before leaving the house, as we planned to grab something to eat before meeting Profesora Ana at 8AM. In the farming town of Atenas there are sodas serving breakfast as soon as people are up and around. We did not know that in the big city of Alajuela (population right around 1 million) nothing opens before 8AM. So our plan to get breakfast somewhere on the square before our 8AM rendezvous was doomed from the start. I found myself with low blood sugar. When I have low blood sugar all bets are off. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I own it. Jill spied a McDonalds on the other side of the park. McDonalds is nothing if not the breakfast venue of last resort so we made a bee-line for it. That took us directly in front of the beautiful cathedral on the square. Jill stopped to take a picture of the beautiful cathedral on the square.

My reaction to Jill wanting to pause and take a picture was less than ideal. She upped the ante with her response and just like that I had one wheel in the ditch.

Upon arriving at said McDonalds we found out they were NOT in fact open. They just had the shutters partway up while the morning crew got ready for the 8AM open. I would wager that there is nowhere else in the entire FECKING universe that McDonalds isn’t open by 6AM. Just to summarize, I had snapped at Jill for tarrying to take a picture of a lovely cathedral en route to a McDonalds that wasn’t even open. And I STILL had low blood sugar.

Profesora Ana later told us that Alajuela is referred to in Costa Rica as the City of Mangoes. True to the municipal moniker, the central park has a stately arrangement of mango trees that are about 100 feet tall. Who likes mangoes? Green parrots like mangoes. The central park in Alajuela is home to a horde of green parrots. Parrots are nice to look at, but they make a godawful racket. At this point, I’m sitting on a bench with low blood sugar, feeling like an ass for having snapped at Jill, and listening to parrots mock me while they gnaw on mangoes.

Ultimately Profesora Ana found us just before 8AM sitting disconsolately on a park bench (benches in parks and ONLY in parks are called “poyos”) staring at McDonalds, willing them to raise the shutters. She said something to the effect of “You Americans and your McDonalds…” and then led us to a nice Panaderia that opened in time for us to walk in and sit down. We got some food in me, but by that point I was in an unrecoverable spin.

Ana turned the Panaderia into a makeshift classroom and we got started. I might have been able to salvage my morning, but today’s Spanish lesson was all about conjugating verbs for the past tense. All of the work we’ve done learning how to conjugate verbs in the present tense has had my nostrils right at the water line, but I felt like I was hanging in there. Here’s my takeaway from today’s lesson: “Most of the conjugations you already learned are still useful, but in the past tense you shuffle up which conjugation goes with which performer of the verb.

What????

Case in point:

• Yo estudio Espanol – Present tense: I am studying Spanish
• Ella estudio Espanol – Past tense: She studied Spanish

The thing that made the penny drop for me (and not in a good way) is that, by convention, Spanish speakers drop the pronoun and rely on the conjugation to convey the pronoun. Boom – like a thunderclap – I’m no longer sure what “Estudio Espanol.” means. With the morning that I’d had, I pretty much threw in the towel at that point. I went through the motions for the rest of the classroom activity, but I was pretty demoralized.

After two weeks of going up and to the right this is my first big stumble in Spanish. I’m sure I’ll be up and at ’em again tomorrow, but it’s been a rough day for me. Jill, on the other hand, is killing it.

Knowing when she’d lost her audience, Professor Ana adjourned the classroom session and took us on a walking tour of Alajuela. We went to the Alajuela Cultural Center learned all about Juan SantaMaria, who was a seventeen year old drummer from Alajuela in the Costa Rican army. Juan volunteered for a successful suicide mission to drive the banditos yanquis invaders out of Costa Rica. I need to do some fact checking, but according to the Costa Rican version of events: The US wanted to build canals to allow ships to transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast via Lake Nicaragua. The US interests set about appropriating Costa Rican and Nicaraguan land by force for the endeavor. The Costa Rican army and one Juan Santamaria caused enough trouble that the invaders went back to the drawing board and made up Panama out of whole cloth (Panama used to be northern Colombia) to build the canal there. The international airport bears Juan Santamaria’s name and Alajuela is proud of him.

After the cultural center Ana took us to El Mercado to show us what a REAL market looks like. I think I mentioned previously that there appears to be an innate civic pride that every Costa Rican has in their hometown institutions. At that point in the day the last thing I needed was the sensory overload of what is, in all fairness, an impressive market. Where the Atenas mercado has maybe 20 vendors, Alajuela needs a map to tell you what’s in each hall of the market.

As a little parting gift Profesora Ana said that tomorrow in class we will need to tell Profesora Maria what we saw and learned in Alajuela today. Yup, tomorrow we’ll be bumbling through Juan Santamaria’s exploits in past tense. At least I was paying attention to that part.

After the market, I just wanted to go home. We walked back to the parking lot, paid our 3,000 Colones ($5) to the parking attendant and headed back to our quiet little town of Atenas.

We made it back home with no further drama and commiserated over a comfort-food lunch of Ritz crackers and $20 PriceSmart cheese.

Jill’s been upstairs seeing clients while I work on today’s post.

Jill and I are fully reconciled from our earlier discord. We are going to celebrate an early Valentine’s day tonight with frozen pizza. If anything can salvage this day, surely it’s pizza and wine with my favorite person…

Last night we tried a new restaurant called La Trocha del Boyero (The Trail of the Ox Herder) . Boyeros were the guys who would lead the oxcarts full of coffee from the farms to market. La Trocha is run by our new friend, Frank. It is an interesting operation to say the least. Frank’s restaurant is at his house. He’s re-purposed his front yard has a full kitchen and a palapa for seating. Even though it’s in a residential neighborhood, the lush growth makes it feel like you are in the jungle.

It’s just Frank. And Frank doesn’t speak English, which made it a great opportunity for Jill and I to practice Spanish.

All of the following occurred in Spanish:

Frank greeted us and told us to pick any table we wanted. He then came over with menus and asked if we wanted something to drink other than water. We all ordered vino tinto and Frank shuttled out a very drinkable red wine. He explained to us that he makes everything to order so the service might take a little longer but he promised it would be worth the wait. I asked for his recommendation and he told us that it’s his signature Salsa la Trocha that makes everything so good so we couldn’t go wrong with anything that had that sauce. Jill and her parents ordered the seabass and I got chicken, all topped with Salsa la Trocha. Frank told us he likes to top everything with shrimp and asked if any of us have shellfish allergies (we had a little back and forth on that topic because my Spanish isn’t to the point where I’ve heard “shellfish allergy” before 🙂 ). Frank told us our appetizer would be beans and tortillas and asked how spicy we wanted our beans. He brought out a perfectly seasoned warm bean dip with freshly fried corn tortilla chips and went to work on our entrees.

About 15 minutes after we ordered a car pulled up and a runner got out with a shopping bag and trotted up to the kitchen. We can only guess that Frank had run out of something in the kitchen and called in a resupply mission.

The food was rustic and delicious and the Salsa La Trocha was as advertised. The plates were comically large and were composed of our chosen protein plus shrimp, rice, salad with chayote, fried sweet plantains, fried green plantains, and papas.

Total bill for 4 people including wine was $117, which is on the high end of the Atenas spectrum but totally worth it. At the end of the meal, Frank told us, in Spanish, he’s adding breakfast service soon and we exchanged numbers on WhatsApp so that he can invite us to the soft opening of his breakfast service. He’s going to ping us the day before. Hopefully we can make it work. Frank is an amazingly gracious and accommodating man who wants to make sure his customers’ dining experience is pleasurable. We were the only table at his restaurant last night and he was hopping the entire time taking care of us and cooking our food. It will be interesting to see how he handles a busy evening.

This morning at Spanish class we worked on expository skills. Profesora Maria gave us each several cards that when put together made a sequence of events. The set of cards I got showed a boy approaching a hot dog vendor and went all the way through the purchase and him eating the hot dog. Jill got a set of cards showing a girl harvesting apples from an apple tree. We had to make up a story for each set of cards and then tell that story, fielding questions asking for more detail from each other and la profesora. We had great fun with that exercise, making up backstories for our characters. My protagonist was Rafael, named for the patron saint of Atenas. I will forever remember the made up saga of “Rafael and el Perro Caliente!”

Jill has clients this afternoon so it was up to me to show her parents a good time. We bought our coffee at the feria Friday from the El Toledo coffee farm and Jill noticed they do tours. Jill booked us for a 1PM tour of the coffee plantation today.

I love to hear people talk about a subject that they are experts in. Gabriel, who runs the coffee operation at El Toledo, is one of those people.

Gabriel took us through the various ways of farming that they’ve used on their 7 acre farm and what they’ve learned along the way. They started with mono-culture and lots of chemicals and then his father got ill from the chemicals so they switched to organic farming, but still mono-culture. Then they evolved to what he called perma-culture where they have a diverse set of flora all over the farm. They had banana trees, mango trees, tangerine trees, gooseberries, and also hardwoods mixed in with their coffee. I’ve previously mentioned the dracaenas, or corn plants, that we see used as living fence posts all over Costa Rica. Today we learned these same plants are used as a sacrificial bug attractors on the coffee farm. Apparently the same bugs that eat the leaves of coffee bushes actually prefer the leaves of the corn plants. So Gabriel has planted corn plants all over the farm to help combat erosion and to give the bugs something that they prefer over coffee leaves. Saves on the need for insecticides, reduces erosion, and keeps the coffee plants unmolested. David Moreland will be glad to hear they’ve also strategically mixed in other species whose flowering season varies so that something is flowering year round, giving the bees a constant buffet.

We got to sample light, medium, and dark roast coffee and Gabriel explained what happens to the coffee bean at each level of roasting.

I ate all of this stuff up. We learned that the conventional wisdom that freezing coffee beans will keep them fresh is bogus. Freezing roasted coffee beans causes the remaining water in the bean to expand when frozen, cracking the air-tight skin of the bean. The resulting fissures allow oxidation (bad) to happen. Who knew? Gabriel says medium roast coffee beans will stay fresh for 4 weeks after roasting. Light roast will stay fresh for 6 weeks and dark roast for 2 weeks. The moral of the story is buy your beans a pound at a time from a roaster that has good turnover and roasts frequently, keep the beans dry and in the dark, and consume them within the allotted freshness window.

The Toledo Coffee farm covers 3 hectares (about 7 acres). On that 7 acres they have 15,000 coffee bushes and a whole bunch of other other crops interspersed with the coffee.

I’m definitely taking Non and D on the El Toledo coffee tour when they come!

Jill’s parents leave tomorrow morning on a 9AM flight. We’ve had a great visit and hope they are now fond of Costa Rica. We will drop them at the airport and then we are meeting Profesora Ana in Alajuela (the town where the airport and PriceSmart are) for another field trip. That saves Ana, who lives in Alajuela, a 2 hour bus ride each way to get to and from the school.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We had a very quiet day en la casa today so no real update.

I promise a full update tomorrow!

Today’s destination was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, listed by multiple sources as the premier waterfall destination in Costa Rica. We were up with the sun and we fueled up with coffee and breakfast pastries (acquired at PriceSmart). Everyone was well organized this morning and we were in the car at 7AM sharp. The La Paz waterfall is a 34 mile drive from our house. The Waze lady told us it would take 1 hour 30 minutes to get there. Earlier in our trip we might have scratched our heads wondering how 34 miles could possibly take an hour and a half. We’ve now got enough experience to know that 20 miles in Costa Rica generally takes one hour.

The drive to La Paz was up and over several mountains and what I saw of the scenery was fantastic. I had to mostly rely on the narrative from my passengers because I was laser focused on the road and Jill’s turn by turn instructions. Once again leaving the house early played to our advantage because we weren’t behind a mass of buses and trucks on the roads and didn’t have too much in the way of oncoming traffic on the drive there. I remembered the lesson of the descent into Bajos del Toro and shifted into first or second gear for the steep descents, letting the transmission govern my top end speed so my brakes would stay cool and functional.

We got to the La Paz Waterfall Gardens right at 8:30 and were the second or third car in the lot. True to form there was a guy in a yellow vest who pointed at where I should back in to park. As I was backing in he came and stood next to the car and gave me the thumbs up when I had backed far enough in for his satisfaction. I admit to getting a non-trivial amount of joy from managing to earns the approval of the men in yellow vests.

The La Paz falls are in the boundary zone between a cloud forest and a rain forest. The amount of lush foliage and brilliant color defies description. Suffering from red-green color blindness, I particularly like the brilliant colors. I can only imagine what they look like for everyone else.

The La Paz Waterfall Gardens is one stop shopping for a number of neat things. The five different falls are the main attractions, but the proprietors have also added other attractions such as a zoo full of rescued animals, a hummingbird garden, and an orchid garden. Also unlike other falls that we’ve been to in Costa Rica, the paths are well groomed with rails and paving stones which make them accessible for any fitness level.

The entry fee was a fairly steep $45 per person, collected in US dollars. Pro-tip: When a venue in Costa Rica prices things in US dollars you get a pretty good idea of who their target market is. Once we saw all of the work that had gone into the infrastructure we understood the $45 fee and felt like it was worth it all the way around.

If you’ve been following along since the beginning of our adventure, you know how much Jill loves a hanging bridge. La Paz did NOT have a hanging bridge, but I think that’s the only demerit on the day.

We started with the non-waterfall attractions including:

• An aviary
• A monkey enclosure
• A sloth enclosure (or perizoso in Espanol)
• A butterfly enclosure
• A hummingbird garden
• Jungle cat enclosures

Jill has declared hand feeding hummingbirds to be her new favorite thing.

After seeing the rescued animals and hummingbirds we were off to the falls!

The trek down the path beside the falls takes you down about 400 steps and you lose maybe 400 feet in altitude. There’s a bar and a little gift shop at the end of the trail where you can soak in the view. Mia Mosher, here is evidence that these are my people:

The nice people who run the place have a shuttle service to take you from the bottom of the trail back up to the main lodge area. The shuttle is a school bus, circa 1978. When the bus arrived to pick us up, the driver turned the engine off and stepped out of the cab. He called a couple of the other employees over and they went around to the driver’s side of the bus and fiddled with the turn signal light mounted on the side of his fender. It was clearly askew. I overheard him chatting (in Spanish) with a couple of the other employees. Apparently on his way down the hill to pick us up a vehicle going uphill had clipped his turn signal light with their side view mirror and knocked it sideways. After staring at it for a couple of minutes, they just twisted the turn signal back to something approximating its original position and shrugged. Minor victory: This was the first time I have been capable of eavesdropping on a conversation in Spanish 🙂 That feeling overshadowed the reality that the road is narrow enough that oncoming traffic clipping each other’s mirrors is de rigeur.

We rode the bus back up the hill and spent some more time strolling around the flower gardens.

At that point we were all hungry so we stopped into the restaurant they have there and got a delicious lunch. Jill, her mom, and I had the Chifrio bowl which is a local dish of rice, beans, fried pork, fried homemade cheese, avocado, and pico de gallo. Yum!

Everyone who wasn’t the driver had an adult beverage with their lunch. I had un vaso de agua.

We wound the hour and a half back over hill and dale and got back to our shanty at about 2PM. We only had one truly terrifying moment on the road on the way home. The Waze lady put us in a position where we had to make an unprotected left turn onto a busy two way street. The only reason we made it through is that a driver coming from my right stopped and blocked traffic for me. People just do nice things like that here.

Feels like we’ve had a full day. The only thing left on the docket is we are taking Jill’s parents to Pizzeria Le Finca for dinner and then to Pops for ice cream.

Tomorrow marks 2 weeks in Costa Rica. Jill and I both feel like our baseline anxiety level is dropping over time. We have had only positive encounters with the denizens of this fine country. The scenery is breathtaking. Life is good.

We were all in bed by about 8PM last night. Jill’s parents were up at 4AM yesterday catch their Dallas flight and we just normally go to bed at 8 🙂

Everyone was up by 6AM and I fired up the Black and Decker coffee pot that we bought specifically for when we have guests. When it’s just the two of us I make our coffee in the Aeropress. Everyone had a nice cup of joe while we watched the sun come up.

I made cheese omelettes for everyone to fortify us for our trip to the feria. We left for the feria at 8AM and stopped at the gas station at La Coope. Once again, I got cocky. I thought I had it dialed in when I rolled down my window and asked the nice man to “Llene de regular”. He nodded and I went back to chatting with my passengers. Next thing I knew he was tapping on the car because I had forgotten to open the gas door. Face palm!

After paying for our 50 liters of gasolina we were off to the feria!

We had a productive outing to the feria, buying:

• una pina (pineapple): $1.30
• una media sandia (half a watermelon) and 4 mangoes: $5.50
• cumino (ground cumin): $0.65
• semillas de sesamo (sesame seeds for making our own tahini): $3.35
• 3 chiles dulces (red bell peppers): $1.65
• 2 bolsas de salsa fresco (2 bags of fresh salsa): $3.35
• 1 bolsa de lechuga (1 bag of lettuce):
• 2 kilos tomates (tomatoes): $1.65
• 30 huevos (30 pasture raised eggs): $4.20
• 1 repollo (cabbage): $1.00
• 2 kilos limones (limes): $1.80
• melon (honedew melon): $3.20
• cafe (coffee): $10.00
• chorizo italiano (Italian sausage): $5.80
• totopos (corn chips): $5.00
• chips de planano (plantain chips): $2.60
• and Jill got a handmade wooden bowl for holding Q-Tips in our bathroom: $5.00

All in cost $58.83… $28 worth of fruits/vegetables/spices and $30 worth specialty items including coffee, Italian sausage, chips, salsa, and Jill’s bowl. I am pleased to report that I made correct change for all of the purchases, which assuaged my feeling of inadequacy for forgetting to open the fuel door.

We came back from the feria and Nana and I got all of the frutas sliced up and into resealable bowls.

Jill had a client session at 11AM and then we set off to the town of Sarchi at noon.

We had a mostly uneventful drive to Sarchi except where we spent five minutes behind a bus that was stopped in an underpass. Everyone was very patient and it ultimately turned out that we were waiting for workers to resurface the road on the other side of the underpass before traffic could resume flowing. Those things now seem totally commonplace to me and Jill. I think that’s a sign that we are assimilating.

Sarchi is the ancestral home of the ox cart makers of Costa Rica and boasts the worlds largest ox cart. They still have an ox cart factory that is powered by a water wheel.

After Sarchi we trundled off to PriceSmart in Alajuela to pick up some supplies (we were critically low on Jill’s coffee creamer and on sharp cheddar cheese). We all had low blood sugar so we popped into the PriceSmart cafe. In the US it’s totally kosher to enter through the exit at Costco if you’re going straight to the food service zone. Not so in Costa Rica! We strolled through the exit holding up our membership card and walked toward the cafe. The guy checking receipts waved his arms and pointed to the entrance and I said “comemos” (we are eating) and kept walking. He immediately got on his walkie talking and called in the security breach. They seem to be sticklers for little things like that.

After de-esecalating the security breach (Jill returned to the receipt checker guy and said “Lo siento!”) and getting our lunch, we were ready to brave PriceSmart. We got out for $105, which I believe proves that the “Costco Effect” (you can’t get out for less than $100) applies in Costa Rica as well. I am please to report that the checkout process was not marred by me inserting my own card into the machine. I followed protocol perfectly!

We hit a bit of rush hour in Alajuela but made it home safely. I think everyone had fun. We will head down to Magda’s for dinner at 6:30PM. We have no idea what she’s cooking for dinner, but that’s part of the adventure.

Neither Jill or I slept well with this morning’s live fire exercise looming.

We took our coffee up to the upper deck and quizzed each other on directions for 20 minutes before beginning our respective personal hygiene regimens. I’m betting today’s phrase that pays is: “Disculpe, podria decirme donde esta X?” I’m also practicing “Puede hablar mas dispacio por favor?” (Can you please speak more slowly?)

We have also been practicing our numbers on the premise that we will have to ask how much things cost: “Cuanto cuesta X?” Apparently the numbers involving fives are my kryptonite. For some reason I have trouble transposing quince and cinquenta. And don’t get me started on quinientos (500). Trouble with numbers is particularly frustrating because I learned all of this stuff cold back in sixth grade (hace cuarenta y tres anos).

We met our profesora, Maria, at the appointed location and she sat us down to give us our mission briefing.

Our job was to go to the market and visit each of:

• A macrobiotica (health food store)
• A tienda (a shop that sells clothes or shoes)
• A carniceria (butcher)
• A verduleria (a fruit and vegetable stand)
• A pulperia (basically a convenience store)

After introducing ourselves as Spanish students. We had a set list of questions we were to ask the proprietors

One of the questions we had to ask each shop was “Que hay…?” (What do you have/sell here?). The sweet lady at the macrobiotica took us literally and walked us around her entire store showing us every thing she had on offer. I mean EVERYTHING she had on offer. We were probably behind the counter with her for 10 minutes. We learned that she and her daughter ran the store and also that her top selling supplement is Morenga followed by Omega 6 capsules.

We went from shop to shop and the people could not have been friendlier or more patient with us.

Jill and I alternated taking the lead at each type of establishment.

We did it! It wasn’t as scary as it could have been, but we were both still exhausted when we got through. Jill and I agreed that now that we know about la mercado we are going to try to shop there to support the local community. On Monday we have to do an oral presentation of our findings with our other profesora, Ana.

Off to the airport to pick up Jill’s parents!

We navigated to the airport without incident and collected our parking ticket as we entered the structure. Parking ain’t cheap at Juan Santamaria airport. It’s $3.50/hour or $45/day.

We are now in possession of Nana and Daddy Bill!

I had another victorio pequeno in the parking garage. I left Jill and her parents where the crosswalk entered the garage from arrivals and went to get my parking ticket validated. The San Jose airport parking setup is where you take your ticket with you to pick up your party then get your ticket validated at an automated kiosk when you are headed back to your vehicle. I left Jill in charge of her parents while I went to pay for parking. When I got there there were four people ahead of me in queue. I watched a Costa Rican lady struggle with the process for what felt like 5 minutes. groaning inwardly (and maybe a little outwardly. I trotted out my nuevo Espanol and said “Perdon…” and stepped forward to show her how to work the machine. 30 seconds later the line was flowing again 🙂

Everyone was hungry so we bee-lined for La Fiesta de las Pupusas where everyone had a pupusa mixto and, per Alfonzo’s prior suggestion, we each had one of their homemade juices. I had a juice made with “cas” which is a Costa Rican sour guava. I declare cas juice at La Fiesta de las Pupusas to be my new favorite thing and will be shilling it to all of our future guests! Everyone enjoyed their lunch and we will likely stop in for another go while Jill’s parents are here.

Now for the update you are probably all waiting for. Jill’s parents arrived with my Google WiFi endpoints and within a matter of 30 minutes or so I had our new mesh network up and running. We’ve now got 30+Mbits down and 5ms pings all over the house. My work is done here.

We are now sitting on our upper deck watching the lights come on out in the valley.

Tomorrow morning we are going to take Jill’s parents to experience the feria at 8AM. Jill has a client session at 11 and then at noon we are going to head for Sarchi (home of the world’s largest ox cart) and we will finish our outing with PriceSmart. Then we will go down to our landlord’s restaurant for dinner.

I’m pretty sure life could not be any better….