...just another day....

I suppose even paradise becomes routine after awhile. Or at least, getting there does. We are here in the Comfort Inn (Quality Inn? Well one of them anyway) hoping to get some sleep tonight before arriving at the airport at 4:30.

Poor Rob is still in the shower. He was the hostage in the CET games today, and was pepper sprayed and then ended up "dead" for his trouble.

We arrive in San Jose tomorrow at noon. Talk to you all then!








'

Business as Unusual

Well our last couple of days has been a little unorthodox in relation to a normal day in the office. Geoff's escapade in Nicaragua had put us desparately behind schedule and left us with a very short time to finish our business.

So pack up and say goodbye on Wednesday night, head off early Thursday morning for the bus station, (view from the most pleasant bus station I've ever been at at top) and the four hour bus trip to (nearly) Atenas. An interesting trip, if long.

We passed through areas we had only visited in the dark or (in my case) in the rain, watched the mountains go by, and dozed on and off. About 2 hours into the trip, a man, apparently blind, carrying an old spanish guitar that had lost most of its varnish, climbed onto the bus and made his way half way to the back. As the bus moved away, he began to play and sing, his voice a beautiful clear tenor, serenading us with Spanish songs about love and the blue sky and his one true girl. After about 20 minutes, he stopped, gave us his name, and told us a story about how he is trying to become a professional musician, and if we liked his music, perhaps we could reward him with a little change.

Our trip took much longer than we anticipated, due to traffic, a festival in a small town, what we assume was an accident on the road ahead, and an hour or standing in the sun while we waited for Geoff to take a second bus into Atenas and send a cab back for us - so we didn't make it in to Atenas until after 3:00 p.m.

We stayed at a gorgeous b&b called Ana's Place (see pictures), but had very little time to enjoy it, as we got there, threw our luggage in our room, and ran (well, walked briskly) to the lawyers for our first meeting. Next, we ran back to Ana's, said hello to the birds, showered, dressed in Atenas appropriate clothing, met up with Geoff at the central parque, and walked to La Trilla (arguably one of the best restaurants in the world), ate supper with Mike and Sharyn, walked to the other end of town (town is not very big) and said "Hello" to the old gang at Puerta Del Sol (Hugs and kisses all round). By 10.00 p.m. we were half baked, having been travelling since 7, so we headed back to Ana's to sleep.

We were up again at 8:00 for an appointment with the bank - we discovered that opening a bank account, credit line and so on in Costa Rica takes two and a half hours and ends with a "come back on Tuesday", now a really big rush back to the lawyers for a directors meeting, pick up the official books, a run to a nearby soda for a quick (and extremely delicious) breakfast, back to Ana's place, check out quick while Rob is packing and hop in a taxi for the half hour trip to the airport by 12:30 (for $16.00). We made it with less than 15 minutes to spare, but we made it!

Whew!

And would I ever do it again? In a New York second!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

I use this title in exactly the sense implied by the little androids who chant it in Blade Runner : they're staggering, disoriented and not too bright. We got in at 0300 hours, to a house in which the furnace had quit working a day or two ago, crawled under the covers and sank into oblivion. We had been traveling (or hanging about airports) since the taxi picked us up in Atenas at 1130 local time, and were done. Like deliriously tired, slightly squiffy, airported-out dinner. In a deep freeze.

Rick, the very helpful plumber/furnace/boiler man from Rick's Plumbing - where else - has just left, and the furnace is now running. A part I replaced 5 years ago went belly up about a week after he replaced the igniter, which tanked a day after we left for Costa Rica. We're not done yet; whoever put the system in before we bought the house did not install components scaled to the size of the house and things need to be changed. But by doing so, the furnace will run less and the heat it does make will be more evenly and efficiently distributed throughout the house.

This has nothing to do with Costa Rica, and everything to do with how life hits you the moment you come back. The banal sameness of the world you know silently closes over your head a few hours after you return. But right now there are people at Rest. La Trilla, eating food in the night breezes that will nail them to their chair with sumptuous excess for ... $8.50 or so a person. There are people sitting and talking in the park under the palms. There is someone driving a car that came from the factory with the words Spanish Fly on the hatch, and probably not using his turn signals. Clean air and crowded buses and fresh fruit and mountains off in the distance and rising to the clouds.
There is surf (maybe) lightly sloshing the playa under the moon (definitely) and someone walking in it. Sol might be in the pool, or Danny, if he is back from camp. Costa Rica hasn't gone anywhere; we have just gone from it.




Double click for extra large Lost in Translation

These Are Not The Droids That You Want

Look Purposeful, check your watch and appear cheerfully concerned that you must hurry, and project the calm certainty that checkpoints are for other people, since you have already been cleared.
Then walk for a half mile of border-crossing mayhem: travellers, guards, dogs, checkpoints, truck-spraying points and baggage searches. Never show your passport once, because no one is asking, and because you don't have it.
Come home. The end.

I know that there was more to it than this scant outline of Geoff's adventures hints at, but unfortunately for everyone who wants to know all of the thrilling details, we are going to Atenas tomorrow and after a marvellous last night out in Coco, are rushing about madly packing - so I don't have time to put them up.

You may have to wait a while.

Given that we are going to probably not have internet access tomorrow, this post may be our last until we are home. I hope that this is not true; I would like to end the blog in synch with the end of the trip, if only for the sake of literary balance. But I don't think I can be timely. If you thought from my writings that I had trouble analysing how coming to Costa Rica tossed my world-view into the blender, I suspect that you ain't, as the saying goes, yet seen nothin' of my coming to terms with what leaving here means.





In simplest terms, I want to go home, and I don't want to leave here at all. And I don't think the two are balanced.

The Eagle Has Landed

...so said Geoff five minutes ago, having crossed the border without incident. Home in an hour or so.

Yay!

Oddities and Endishments

Here we have the perfect vehicle for Athena. Airy, light, comfortable (for a given value of relativity) and as unlikely to be allowed on the roads in Canada as General Motors' new 2009 Cardboardmobile .







Next we have something guarenteed to give Homeland Security pause when they go through a suitcase coming in from Costa Rica. I would dearly love to be there for the search - as long as I had put this soap in luggage not even slightly connected with me.

The Terror brand name is applied to a large number of cleaning products in almost all the hues industrial dyes can produce; I took only this quick snapshot of the purple stuff. And of the one pushy pink Terror that insisted on crowding into the shot after telling the others how its cousin Binary Explosive (dog shampoo) shot weddings for a living, and that this schmoe didn't know how to stage a picture.

And Finally:

Razor Wire is My Friend. Typical security measures here. The picture hardly does the stuff justice.

Elsewhere in the News....

...David and I went on a photographic expedition - more correctly, an expedition to photograph - the other way down Playa del Coco,and took pictures until we exhausted our camera batteries. This was unfortunately far too early, given all the neat things we kept finding in the crevices of the rocks where the sand gives out. The ocean has been doing its best to wear down the rocks for uncounted millenia, and what it has achieved so far could have filled several memory cards, if we had the batteries to do it. And the cards.

It seems strange to find so many different kinds of shells each with the little soft living bit inside still there, and struggling to retain all its adjectives. Usually when I see them, nothing remains but hard and fragmented exosity, to invent a word. And there is a surprising amount of soft stuff calling these shells home too, something else I did not expect. It is a wonder how they get it all stuffed back inside.

The tide pools are not the only places teeming with life; there were so many things burrowed into the sand where the waves sloshed, with nothing but some tail(?) gill(?) derriere(?) sticking out for breathing that I could not put a foot down anywhere without stepping on at least two or three. I gave up and left the dribbling surf and walked up where the water didn't reach and the little blighters, if there were any around, had dug in so far that they might as well not be there.

As we were walking back, David spotted a dog that walked over to the waves and sat down with a self-satisfied look, so that the riffles of sea water were cooling its haunches. I think it knew we had no working camera.

We walked to the Supermercado thereafter along the stinky Pollo Crispy shortcut. I realize that this is a sentence that appears mostly sense-free. Even if you pronounce 'pollo' as poy-yo, (spanish for chicken) it doesn't help much, so I will start from the beginning. There is a little fried chicken stand on the main tourist drag , with a gap between it and its nearest neighbour, the terminous of a long strip of vacant land that runs between other properties and serves at the street end as a dumping ground for ... something unique in the annals of trash. There are no words, not because it is overwhelming, but because I have no idea what I am smelling. But the path is clear, if utterly primitive. At the end of it, like everything in Costa Rica, there is something unexpected.

A bridge...

and this house, for sale, and as elegant as anything here...


There are a few more run-down properties and you come out just up the street from the soda by Ed's place where we had lunch. On the way back from the store - I have described the shortcut as you experience it walking home, because it is the more dramatic this way - we saw a monkey in the tree by Ed's house. And we still had no camera. (Stinky shortcut photos are from early this morning)

Best Laid Plans....

El Presidente Geoff is going to make the attempt to walk across the Costa Rica/Nicaragua border tomorrow morning. He has been told that he has to see his embassy, and his embassy is here. Worst case, he will be told he can't enter Costa Rica with the documentation he has. Best case, they will take pity on him and let him in, or even better, not notice him at all.

His very good friend Eddie will be there with a car, waiting to give him a lift back her to the playa.

If all goes well, we will actually try and make it to Atenas on Thursday and still try and carry out our meeting. If it doesn't we will be heading straight to San Jose on Thursday, staying overnight, then leaving directly from there, and coming back soon to take care of business.

We will be posting tomorrow to let you know how it worked out.

Update on (Uncle) Geoff.

So far, no good news. We were told by the British Ambassador to Nicaragua and Costa Rica yesterday that Geoff has to download an internet application, fill it out, and courier it with a bank draft to San Jose Costa Rica.

They will then process it, usually within a few hours, and courier it back to his address in Nicaragua. The issues? First of all, a best case estimate will be four days. Secondly, he has been unable to find an internet cafe that can print the forms he needs from the internet. Thirdly, even if he could, he needs someone who "knows him well" to endorse the photo and the form - but he doesn't know anyone. Fourthly, he needs a passport to get a bank draft. Fifthly, er...what address in Nicaragua?

In Nicaragua, you also need your passport to withdraw money from a bank, so Geoff is running out of cash and options. He has an appointment at 2:00 today to find out if there is any way they can get him back into Costa Rica without his passport - if they can do that, then he can take the forms directly to San Jose and have his passport re-issued right away.

Hopefully this will all work out. I will be posting late this afternoon with another update.

Another day gone

It is unfortunate that time now seems to be spinning past with the acceleration that routine events bring to our lives: It does not seem strange to grab the back-pack and slog on down to the Luperon Supermercado for groceries, which is how I spent a portion of this early afternoon - or to slog back and fall thereafter into the pool. When the water pressure cuts out around ten and I'm still in the shower with champu in my hair, I am not surprised; it is merely the Mapache staff (Nicaraguans hired by the development company to do all the hard labour in this collection of vacation condos) enthusiastically watering the vegetation - as they have no doubt been directed to - so that we have green grass in the middle of the dry season. And it will happen again tomorrow. And it doesn't bother me.

Not so routine is the disaster currently befalling Geoff in Nicaragua, but as all I can do is offer suggestions from the gallery, it has to me a slight feel of a trainwreck happening to someone else. Of course, this is strictly false - but that's how it feels. For a while, I was coming in from the rancho every fifteen minutes or so for next dose of bad news - more routine.

The sight of a tica mother and two kids on a scooter, no helmets, is so normal as to be unremarkable. As is the sight of yet another twenty-five year old ToyotoLand Cruiser - if I was going to buy a vehicle down here, that's what I'd go for. Two of them actually, a six seater with a closed-in cab for hauling people , and a pickup for everything else. Life is loose here, not so many rules, or people to enforce them, and this too is becoming normal. Somewhere (update: here it is) we have a photo of a guy on a ladder in the middle of a street in Santa Cruz fiddling with the lights for some festival or other while traffic flowed in both directions around him. No problema. Sort of flowed. Everyone got past sooner or later.

Speaking of vehicles, Larry says that he thinks he can get the door for the Bongo fixed for 80 k... colones of course, about $160.CDN (or US, for that matter), which I hope is an accurate estimate. We shall see.

Grilled marlin for supper - now we are not talking about vehicles - with onions and tomatos and limes that are orange on the inside and taste like angry lemons with an identity crisis, and good old boiled potatoes and carrots, a walk on the beach after dark and a discussion with David on such astronomy as I can remember. Plenty of stars out for examples. Back home - and Sol brought over a pamphlet with Spanish to English translations of useful words and we had fun trying to understand each other again. I suspect that the short sentences chosen for translation were picked so that the Spanish reader could see both the similarities and diferences in how grammar works for each language - because they sure weren't chosen for sense. Unless you are looking for a bar fight, what good is "The short man was also fat and ugly." going to do you?

Or "I want a grand piano and a new rug?"

In other news....

...Geoff, the duly elected president of VirtuallyUnlimited Central America S.A. is currently stuck in Nicaragua.

Somehow, he has managed to no longer have his passport, most likely (he thinks) by not getting it back at the border crossing in.

So he can't get home. He has reported the loss to the police, and headed off on a bus trip to Managua to see the British Embassy and (hopefully) get some sort of temporary travel document that will get him back into the country.

We have a super important business meeting in Atenas scheduled for the day after tomorrow, at which he must be present, so we are here with fingers crossed.

And here we will stay. Since this is a work day for me, I will be here er... working, while David and Rob go off and find us food and stuff. Then there will probably be another hard day at the pool and beach playing with the local kids, and Sol. Poor, poor us.

Day's end

No Bongo mas. Larry has it back and all we need to do now is find out what they want for a new door for a truck that he says the dealers here can't get parts for because Kia isn't importing them into Costa Rica any more.

Oh well.

Tonight Sol's parents invited us over to the rancho for some barbied meat and fractured Spanish/English on all our parts; much fun was had by all.

It's late-ish, and I am going to let tiredness curtail my usually verbosity. 'Night, all.

Bits and Bods

Just because, we wanted to put together a collection of strange pictures that had no real place in our posts, but were notable none the less. We will caption them as best we can...
Left, Rob in the sunrise light as we come in to Houston; Middle, David sleeping on the 4.5 hour bus ride between San Jose and Playa del Coco; Right, Christmas set up at Geoff's while he was sleeping.
Left, the Venezuelan beer coaster; middle, weird sky at Ocatal; right, family at the beach. (The kids around here really need to loosen up and have some fun.) Left, Geoff and David on the bike; Middle, el Presidente Geoff in his oficina; Right, a ball in the pool.


Left, greenery at Geoff's; Middle, Gekko outside the door; Right, I don't know what it is, but is about the size of a medium dog.

Left, the Pizza Hut (this is the actual restaurant, not just a bus painted to advertise); middle, a Not For Sale sign; Right, David's picture of an iguana.

And there you have it. A little more flavour for you. We will be having a lazy day today, basically waiting for Geoff, Larry and Peter to get back from Nicaragua so I can retrieve them at the bus station. We have no idea when they're coming, so we have to stay close to the phone. Personally, I could use a day lounging at the pool and not doing much of anything at all.

Stay tuned.

"Rob", I said as we sat in a small Costa Rican restaurant that styled itself as a "Restarante Italiano y Pizzeria" eating very strange but good pizza and watching a 6 inch long grasshopper try and exit through the glass doors while Bohemian Rhapsody played in the background, "Where is DJ when you need him?" (More of the drinks senora? (Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?))

It seems to be a theme, and perhaps the reason we write these blogs at all. No matter where we go during a day, we will see countless things and experience countless moments and wish we were sharing them with friends and family.

Our best friends, Alice and DJ come up most often, undoubtedly because of similarities in age and experience. Today, for example, we drove for about an hour - the last part down a fabulous country road, small mountains in the near distance, weird and wild looking animals grazing in the fields and ditches along the way - to a small town called Guaitil, population 700. About 200 of these people (according to the guide book) actually still create pottery in the traditional pre-Columbian way. The town seems prosperous, with some streets paved, a bank/postoffice and even a small place that does photocopies, faxes and has internet access. (All closed, of course, as it is Saturday in a non-tourist town.)

At the first place, we were greeted by a team of three small children, who immediately called for their uncle.."Venga, Tio! Los Gringos!" the oldest girl calls. (Come on Uncle! There be white folks!) The artista was a young man in his mid-twenties who had created all of the beautiful things in his place. He spoke English well, and described to us all of the wonderful things you could do with his pottery. Including the fact that they could withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees C, and were microwave safe. Alice would love this, I thought to myself. I gave Rob the job of picking something out, since I would have taken one of everything.

A second place, with different beautiful stuff, and another young man, this one with sketchy English but he wanted to try! "Quanto questas?" I ask. "Seben dollares!" "Y esta?" I pick up another piece, but I had exhausted his English skills, and he types "15" into his calculator and shows it to me.

We decide that although we have only seen one percent of what Guaitil has to offer, we had better say "basta!" and leave, while we still had enough money to get home. The girls would have loved that place, I thought.

And so it goes. Wes would love that! or Too bad Vicky's not here! or Mum would really approve of this place! we will say. Alice and DJ have to see this! Lincoln must bring Deanna here, she would love it! And Geoff is always looking for Duncan so he can have a reason for looking at georgous girls far too young for him. Always there is something to share. So much so that we have a proposition for the lot of you - stay tuned for the end of the post....

...but, lest you feel that it is all sunshine, sand and something else starting with s that I can't bring to mind at the moment, we have our not so good excitement as well. Another accident with Larry's truck - this one, a guy on a motorcycle runs into the door and tries to blame me. He spoke no English, and my Spanish was not anywhere near up to the specialized language he was using to describe his side of the story, and what he wanted us to do. He finally agrees to shoulder half the blame, and instead of calling the police and getting his insurance involved etc... we drive all over the area looking for a bank machine so we can give him a bit of money to pay for the damages to his bike. Just to make our journey for money more fun, it seems that the bank networks were mostly down, and every machine we went to was either out of service or only dispensing cash to its own customers. We found a Scotiabank eventually in Liberia, only 35 minutes away, took out some colones and sent him on his way. Dios mio.

If anyone else hits this truck, Rob says, he can keep it and we will just buy it from Larry. We are now so paranoid, that we are going to forgo the trip to see the live volcano and sit in the hot springs, for fear that someone else will hit it and really damage it badly this time.

And now the proposition. In 2017 or 2018, during our 35th year of marriage, Rob and I would like to drive the entire length of the Pacific coast, from Alaska to Chile. We will need all 10 years to prepare for this, we figure, but we would like it if everyone who can would come along. It would be wonderful for us to share our experiences live, instead of just writing about them.

What do you say?

A Day, Balanced

Thanks to a generous offer from a friend of Geoff's, we have the use of a vehicle until he and Geoff return from Nicaragua, where they are meeting the tri-monthly requirements of ex-pats in Costa Rica, namely leaving the country for three days.



Meet the Kia Bongo Frontier. Diesel, 4WD. Four doors.

We're not quite sure what it is, but it fulfills so many needs it doesn't matter what we call it.




Note the word on the windshield. There is nothing wrong with this neat little truck, but silent does not quite sum it up.


I'm guessing that you'll never see one in North America because it doesn't have any airbags and I bet it wouldn't pass our crash testing.




We used it to go zip-lining at Witch's Rock. Well, David and I zipped. See photo at the top , and imagine that there is 60 to 150 feet of air and trees under you, and wind whipping past your face as the line sags and hums under your weight... and you start to get an idea of just how much fun this is. Step one is to assert that there is nothing medically or mentally wrong with you and that should anything happen to you, you have already signed your life away anyway, so tough.
Step two is to have one of your two guides strap you into the harness, which they do quickly and competantly, and then pay attention to a short, but vitally important, lecture on hooking up and control and braking, and what to do if you don't reach the end of the cable before you stop. ( I found that this is easier to do than you might think, especially since it is difficult to estimate the speed at which the end of the cable is approaching, at least for the first couple of runs.
Step three: trot up the hill behind the guides, look over the edge and wonder if this was such a good idea after all. One guide goes on ahead, and the cable sings as he shoots away. The other hooks you to the line, tells you where to brake - and you push off...

....this is FUN! After a bit, the only fearI had was that my head was getting sweaty in the heat and I might lose my glasses forever in the trees below. I had seen the guide do one run and deliberately turn upside down and spin as he went - and lose his hat and sunglasses thereby. Not that I was going to go upside down, if I could help it, but you need both hands to make sure this doesn't happen, and that leaves nothing to hold on the old specs with.

Fortunately I worry too much.

Thereafter we returned to to Coco, then went on to the beach at Ocatal and splashed in the surf, and here the good things of the day begain to be balanced with the not so good. This is not our truck; it is for sale (sign in the windshield says Se Vende) and we have been babying it along and taking no chances. At the beach there was one space left when we arrived, and we parked with two feet on either side. The car on the right was teal. When we came back that car was gone but another SUV had parked behind our truck, and it looked as if we were going to have to wait to leave - and then someone came and moved it and we left for Coco, and the grocery store.

People here drive...casually is a polite way to put it. We pull into the grocery store parking lot, and Jane signals a turn into a parking spot - and starts to turn right - and then some part-time motorcyclist decides that he will pass her on the right side as she does so. Jane panic-stopped even as I noticed this guy and yelled, but she seriously twisted her neck against the shoulderbelt in doing so. And when I went to get out of the truck, I found that the front edge passenger door is now rubbing against the plastic bumper cover. Sure enough, there are streaks of teal paint on the bumper.

I will have to have a closer look at it in the daylight - maybe it can simply be moved back in place. Fortunately, none of the tin-work was touched and I suspect that even the streaks of paint will come off with some steel wool. Jane has had some tylenols and a hot shower - and is still sore.

Saying goodbye to new friends.

Our new friends from San Jose left yesterday. Dad lives here full time, working as a cost accountant at a resort hotel in a nearby beach town. It's summer holidays, and the rest of the family visits whenever possible. They will be back - but unfortunately it will be after we have left for Atenas, so we won't see them.

So hugs and kisses and goodbyes all around. They left us their game bag, with Bingo and Uno and Jenga, and promised to stay in touch.

So late afternoon, heading in from the pool after a swim and a chat with our other new friends, the phone rings. It's Danny's Mom, calling to let us know they arrived ( a chore for her since she speaks no English), and Grandma in the background telling us she misses us already, and then Danny, to make sure he has our email address and to assure us that if there is anyway he can get back here before we go he will.

Friends forever? Who knows. But I don't agree with Rob's sentiments that the Costa Rica of earlier days is gone. I think it is alive and well on those little back streets where we ate lunch, and in San Jose and Atenas and in small towns and villages throughout the rest of the country.

And in people like Danny and his family.

Musings

This post is a sort of addendum to others I have already done: nothing new, but expansion of ideas I've already covered, while I try to square away things in my head. Humans use mental short-cuts called heuristics to apprehend the world and break it into managable chunks, if only so that they have time to do something useful with their lives, rather than spending it just sitting and thinking. When these shortcuts are discovered to be...insufficiently complex, then you either live with wrong answers, or walk around in confusion until you retool how you interpret what you're looking at.

Hence my less than clear conclusions of the past few days.

Today Geoff's friend Ed very generously drove us around a bit, and in doing so gave me a much wider picture of the area around Playa del Coco, and things that are going on here.He took us into the Four Seasons Resort near here - at least as far in as they would allow no-account people like us, which was the first part of the driveway - and we could see out and down onto Playa Panama, and the reason for the exclusive nature of the place was obvious. The view was stupendous, and were a big pile of money no object, I could easily stay here for that sight alone. The acre of grass beside the drive was as perfect as any golf green I have ever seen, and there was a curving wall of transplanted palm trees four deep and forty feet high by the gates. But the countryside around the resort was semi-open, semi-arid and agricultural. We had seen farms, fields of sugarcane, pastures with stringy, lop-eared brahmas, colourful, expensive houses set into the hills, and a long way to the east, rising up into the clouds, a blue-green mountain. The roads were good, if winding and hilly at times. Everywhere there were signs of construction, lots for sale, or ads for resorts existing or planned.There was even a huge billboard stating that the property around it was NOT for sale, with the unstated sub-text to stop bugging the owner.

(Picture herein is of new development up the hill from Geoff's place at Playa del Coco.)

All of these are heuristic altering things, or at least capable of affecting the small heuristic subset that I have been using to deal with this place. There is no regulation of real estate here. An owner can list his property for a price, and someone else can come along, list the same property for more, "sell" it and pay the owner his original price and pocket the difference. Or "sell" something to which he has no title. If the buyer is a gringo, so much the better, because it is well known that they have such deep pockets that they will never miss it; it's not theft as much as the aquisition of unwanted trifles. Perhaps the owner of the land and the sign was tired of people showing up thinking they owned his field.

There is so much going on here that people not working don't want a job, and the future seems to offer no end of things for locals to do to make money. It is evident that a lot of capital is being invested in Coco and Hermosa, in infrastructure as well as real estate. There are large towers going up, and talk of famous names and big money buying up worthless-looking lots, knocking everything down and building villas always somewhere nearby, even if no one knows for sure.

Today's drive seemed to remove the last impression I had that Costa Ricans are being swept along by forces beyond their control. At whatever level of capability they possess, they seem to doing just fine, and prospering. There is far less bureaucracy here, and economic niches are filled as fast as they appear, and happily abandoned when they no longer work.

Whither Costa Rica?

Pardon my whimsy in lapsing into Letters to the Times, circa 1930. Over the last couple of days, a topic of conversation that has popped up now and again - usually when we are looking at some condo/house that is going for $600,000 US - that the Costa Rica of years past is long gone, swamped by a flood of tourists and those that feed off these fat and slow-moving fish. It is not that this is necessarily a bad thing - I don't know enough about things here to comment intelligently one way or the other - but it is apparent that rising prices, enthusiastic building of resorts, condos, future golf courses and the like have changed Playa del Coco forever. The little fishing village of the past has joined the choir invisible, or most of it has: see pictures of the little soda on a back street where we had lunch, included here for your edification and enjoyment. The price we paid was probably 20% higher than it would have been in a town not full of touristas like us.

My first proto-post vanished tonight in the flurry of showing Danny pictures of the Chrysler and googlemaps of our house and the home farm - and with the fun of showing off our car, vanished the semi-sour mood occaisioned by a couple of incidents earlier today. So much so that I'm not even going to try to resurrect what I had written. Those who upset me are free to go and boil their heads or not; I do not care one way or the other.

It's another games night, bilingual Bingo on the rancho. Earlier, Jane and I did one of things that couples do when they're being stereotypical: a walk on the beach at sunset. See pictures. The sun vanishes over the horizon by 6:00 pm here year-round. Or near as makes no difference. This is upsetting my internal expectations; with this much heat, it is supposed to stay light until after 9:00 pm.


The general wrench of dislocation into a new culture seems to be passing, and with its slow ebb, the number of startlingly strange things on which to comment on drops as well. Remind me sometime to get on a 'use-of-gorgeous-solid-hardwood-where-particleboard-or-melamine-would-do-at-home" tear, because I have a lot I could say on that very subject. But this acceptance of things may seriously reduce the amount of copy I am generating; I will try to be overly verbose by way of compensation. Tomorrow. Buenos Noches.