...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)