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.
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?
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?
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. ^_^)
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.
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.
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?
.jpg)
 (2).jpg)
Gabriel made a card for Mamie in Gaspé:
.jpg)
 (2).jpg)
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.
In Costa Rica, there are 135 species of snakes, and only 17 are known to be venomous. Experts state that the different venomous snakes found in Costa Rica are not exactly easy to find, and that most of the snakes in Costa Rica are nocturnal and usually just rest up during the day. These facts don’t make Mélanie feel any better especially after she came across this when sweeping outside our bathroom:
A snake had decided to squeeze itself through a tiny hole in the stone wall that circles our house in order to molt. Mélanie is quite scared of snakes and getting direct confirmation that at least one of the 135 species in Costa Rica likes to hang out at our house doesn’t help matters. (Although I found it fascinating that snakes can climb vertical surfaces like our stone walls.)
Pouring salt on the wound, the first thing that Léah reported when she came home, “Jésus, a boy in my school, got bitten by a snake today”. You should have seen Mélanie’s face.
In a panic, Mélanie spoke to one of the gardeners working nearby to allay her fears. His response? “You shouldn’t worry about the snakes; it’s the scorpions that are dangerous.” Oh great, those molt in our clothes drawers!
“Aquí fue donde la chancha torcío el rabo” is a Costa Rican expression which literally translates to, “this is where the pig tail twisted”; however, the equivalent expression in English would be, “here is where the crap hit the fan”. In general, our experience has been positive but the last week has had some real rough spots.
It hasn’t been a complete breeze with the kids at school because we still take a deep breath each morning and hope that all will go well with our 2 younger ones. This morning went smoothly but we are realistic that we have to take each day at a time. No doubt there will be good days and bad days.
After we believed that our car situation was behind us last week, we started planning a road trip for the weekend and even thought to leave right after school/work on Friday. One important thing about a road trip: the car needs to actually start. Sadly for us, our new-used car decided not to start on Friday morning, or Friday night, or even Saturday morning. I had to call roadside assistance for a tow truck and it was very difficult just to explain our whereabouts when the person on the other end of the phone only spoke Spanish. When the tow truck finally found me 2 hours later, it was a bizarre experience (to say the least) coordinating a compression-start of the car with someone who didn’t speak a word of English.
When we finally got the issues with our car resolved midday Saturday, we headed an hour west of us to Playa Hermosa to see the ISA World Surfing Games which can be described as the “Olympics of 
surfing”. We hadn’t made a reservation at a hotel and we regretted it when it took us a few hours to find somewhere to stay. The kids were amazingly patient in the car as we stopped at literally every single hotel to ask if they had a room. We did finally find a place before it got dark and made sure that it at least had a pool to reward the kids. The accommodation was way more than we had hoped to spend but we didn’t really have a choice – we weren’t exactly going to sleep 5 of us in our old truck.
Everything was starting to seem much brighter this morning. We had just come back from a great overnight stay on the coast where we saw some world class surfing, and our 3 kids were happy when we dropped them off at school this morning. Both Mélanie and I were feeling pretty positive… until we got a message from our real estate agent that we have to be out of the house that we are staying 
in at the beginning of September. This is the same guy who has been telling us that it won’t be a problem for us to stay as long as we want. So now we are stuck with the possibility of not having a place to stay in 5 weeks. We wouldn’t be so stressed about it if there were many other options in this area but unfortunately, the rental market is so dry here right now. It was such a struggle finding our current place before we left on our trip (actually, we only confirmed it a week before we left) and now we are back to square one.
