Mother’s Day in Costa Rica, which happens to be today, is a very big deal here. The kids have spent the last 2 weeks preparing Mother’s Day cards and presents.
Léah’s card for Mélanie:
Gabriel’s card for Mélanie:
How many Jewish Bubbies do you think had cards made for them in Costa Rica?
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Gabriel made a card for Mamie in Gaspé:
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Costa Rica boasts the highest standard of living in Central America and has a vibrant technology sector, but “postal authorities say that 1 in 5 pieces of mail is undeliverable because they can't figure out where the addressee lives” (LA Times, 2007). This is due to the fact that Costa Rica doesn't have a standardized system of addresses; instead, “official” addresses in this country read like treasure-hunt clues. Take a look at the address for this restaurant in our town:
“50 meters west of the ‘Nacional al Boyero’ monument”.
Most Costa Rican addresses are expressed in relation to the closest community landmark; in the case pictured above, a monument. But to make it even more challenging, sometimes that landmark no longer even exists. Plus, when Costa Ricans give directions, a city block is considered to be 100 meters long regardless of its length. So for the address of the restaurant, it isn’t an exact 50 meters from the monument but rather a half a block.
In Atenas (where we live), the streets aren't named, and virtually none have signs. I haven’t even seen a house with a number. We called for roadside assistance this week to boost the dead battery on our car and it took them 3 hours to find us… and we were at our house!
For those of us that have become reliant on Google Maps, this is a big adjustment when you can’t use it to help you find “125 meters west of the old Coca-Cola plant”.
We celebrated Naimah’s birthday with a cake last night and wanted to buy party hats for the kids like we do in Canada. However, in Costa Rica, it seems that it is the tradition to wear masks at birthday parties instead and therefore, that is all that we could find in stores. The kids were more than pleased to have a little masquerade.
Naimah loves Barbie and wanted a doll from the movie “The Diamond Castle”. We were lucky to find a doll in one of the stores in a nearby town but of course, the doll doesn’t sing in English, it sings in Spanish. Naimah officially now has Barbies that speak English, French, and Spanish… I hope Ken can understand them all.
Naimah’s birthday is tomorrow. To celebrate the occasion, we wanted to do something special so we went to a great amusement park in San José called Parque de Diversiones. The kids had a fantastic time.
All of the pictures can be found here.
If you don’t like snakes, you have to do your best to get over that fear in Costa Rica. The same goes for spiders in this area of the world because there are many of them. I have been taking pictures of all of the insects and arachnids that we come across so that we can search on the Internet in order to figure out what we have actually seen. The unofficial roles and responsibilities in our family: the kids find the creatures, I “ooh and aah” and snap some photos, and Mélanie steers clear when they are extra big.
The kids discovered an especially large spider last weekend:
It is a golden orb-weaver and it is very impressive when you see it up close. I explained to Gabriel that the tensile strength of its web is much stronger than steel – hence the reason why Spiderman’s web is so strong (there is no better way to make these things click than when I use a superhero reference).
Speaking of Spiderman… Gabriel prepared a little daypack by himself before we headed out this morning for a daytrip. Neither myself nor Mélanie checked before we left to see what he had packed (I figured it might just be some toys). When we came home and opened it after the kids had gone to sleep, we discovered that he had packed some Spiderman costumes (I guess in case he ran into trouble out on the Costa Rican streets and needed to quickly change into his alter ego).
We have yet to find a video rental place that rents legal copies of DVDs. This country is flooded with bootleg videos.
