McPinto

If we start to feel like the family from “The Mosquito Coast” dealing with the bugs, snakes, and scorpions, a quick jaunt to San José provides the creature comforts of North America. There might not be any Tim Hortons but staples like McDonald’s and Subway can easily be found. It is always interesting to see what kind of twist these international megachains have to cater to the local population. For example…

When we lived in London, England, we got a kick out of the fact that McDonald’s had a McCurry sandwich to cater to the British love for Indian food. In Costa Rica, Gallo pinto is the prototypical traditional dish of pre-cooked rice and beans so add McDonald’s to the mix and you get a “McPinto”.

Even though Canada uses the metric system, one still orders either a 6” or 12” Subway sandwich. In Costa Rica, you order either a 15 cm or 30 cm sandwich. (I won’t tell Léah that her 15 cm sandwich was really only 5.9 inches.)

 

On the topic of megachains, Wal-Mart cannot be left out. However, Costa Rica doesn’t have Wal-Mart but rather Hipermás. Wal-Mart owns a big chunk of Hipermás and when you enter the store, it is pretty much the same store but swap the happy face logo for a whale.

Spending a few hours in air-conditioned restaurants and shopping malls was a big change for the kids. Best line from our 4-year-old around midday in reaction to her feeling a bit like a fish out of water today, “it feels like we are on an adventure”.

No Artificial Ingredients

The Costa Rica Tourism Board picked a very fitting slogan: "No Artificial Ingredients." For such a small country, there is no shortage of plein air activities to enjoy. Last week, we went to Los Chorros Waterfalls (situated a half hour from us).

It was hot in the sun and Naimah made good use of the umbrella that we had recently purchased for her to create some shade.

Let’s Google That Bug

When a 4-year-old, upon spotting an insect that she can’t identify, says to her brother and sister, “let’s Google that bug”, the usage of a company name as a verb reaches a new level when it is part of the lexicon of such a young child. When I hear those words coming from Naimah, it is my call to action to grab my camera. In less than a half hour this morning, we came across some interesting species just on our back porch.

Léah and Gabriel quickly identified this one sitting on our door screen as a leaf bug.

This one looks like it is a member of some butterfly family.

But what the heck is this? Gabriel called it a “furry tiger bug”. Those glowing yellow antennae? That’s not an effect from the camera.

On the subject of discoveries, Mélanie noticed just this week that we have bananas growing on the trees outside our bathroom (close to where she discovered the infamous snake).

But Gabriel and I couldn’t figure out what this is growing 2 trees over.

And while I am at it listing some of these head scratchers, what exactly is this in front of our neighbor’s house? Is it a bat net or something?

Can I Google “weird web net thingy” and get an explanation?

When It Rains, It Pours

In Costa Rica, the rainy season (or "green season") is from May to mid-November. Costa Ricans call this wet time of year their winter. I don’t want to jinx it (even though I am probably jinxing it by writing this blog post), but so far, the rainy season has consisted of beautiful days up until early afternoon. By the time you are completely exhausted and burnt out (literally) from the sun and heat, the clouds come in and often the rains are fairly light. In general, we haven’t minded it that much.

However, when nature decides to really flex its muscles… wow, there is nothing like it. The thunder and lightning storms are amazingly powerful. The second night that we were living in Costa Rica, we experienced a huge storm and it felt like our house would be swept away by the rains (it probably didn’t help that I recently saw The Wizard of Oz with Léah). The kids were terrified and we couldn’t blame them (especially when the roof started leaking which added an extra dimension to the fear). It is hard to comfort one’s children when you are shaking yourself.

Now that we are into week 5 of our journey, the kids have gotten more used to the storms and it doesn’t bother them as much when the skies open up with their full fury.

For those of you reading from the “Wet Coast” of Canada, you think British Columbia has rain? How about this?

Mountain View

When Mélanie and I committed to Costa Rica, we knew that we didn’t want to live in San José since it is a big city. In our minds, the Costa Rican experience was all about nature and our preference was to live in the mountains in a small town. At first, we doubted that it would be possible to be in a rural area because I need high-speed Internet to be able to work. After doing a considerable amount of researching and networking, we were so excited to find out that our goal could be achieved by making contact with Ray at CRWiFi. In a nutshell, Ray beams high-speed Internet from antennas situated in the mountains. When we were ready to book a beautiful house in the hills, we coordinated the installation of a receiver with Ray in order to have high-speed Internet available as soon as we arrived.

I am very, very fortunate to be able to develop software while being surrounded by coffee plantations, fruit trees, toucans, iguanas etc.

Sadly, we have to leave this house in around 3 weeks and we will definitely miss it. We have such a spectacular view being perched up high.

(If you listen closely while watching the video, you can hear Léah ask Mélanie to smell her armpit. Don’t think she is strange, she was trying her first deodorant stick. ^_^) 

Fun with Friends on Mother’s Day

We celebrated Mother’s Day at John and Patsy’s house. They were such amazing hosts and everybody had a great time.

John is the “Grill King”… the way he worked the chicken on the BBQ was a sight to behold.

We haven’t taken many family pictures because I am normally the one behind the camera. I love how Naimah is kicking up her heal in the picture.

Mélanie and Patsy (I can understand quite a bit when Patsy speaks her “Mexican Spanish”).

Water limbo

Of course, Mélanie needed some quality “Latin baby” time.

Patsy has details on her blog as well.

Stowaway

The rest of the family was in the kitchen when Mélanie called out to us to come see something. She had been in the middle of hanging up some of the swimsuits to dry when she discovered a stowaway.

The scorpion was very much alive and had decided to camp out in my swimsuit. I transferred him to a Ziploc bag and we set it free in a field the following morning.

 

As mentioned before, creepy crawlies such as scorpions, spiders, and snakes are fairly common here. Nervous for our children’s well-being, we researched a bit on the Internet and read that Costa Rica has 12 types of scorpions, but none are dangerous; their sting is similar to a wasp. Scorpions in the United States are much more deadly and dozens of people die in Arizona from them every year.