Daily Life, Tamarindo, Venga Costa Rica

Greetings all, after a bit of a blogging break!

A new friend of ours here suggested that, "Bloody hell, people back home don't want to keep reading about Costa Rican adventures. The blog makes everything seem so rosy. Tell them the way it really is."

So, herewith is a look into the more mundane aspects of life in Nosara, Costa Rica.

We need to pay rent each month and currently need to pay a down payment on our rental house post-12/15. In order to achieve this I have to either take money out of an ATM, in large sums daily, beginning a full week in advance of rent payment (or even longer when putting down first and last months rent + security deposit) and then hide these funds in our safe. Or, I have to somehow manage to set our Bank of America account up for wiring capability remotely. I just spent 45 minutes on the (skype) phone with a host of BofA folks trying to accomplish this...and failed.

We shop for groceries at the Super Nosara, which is no Whole Foods (or Safeway), though you can get a gallon of mango pulp, a soccer ball, and fingerpaints all in one stop.

We do dishes. (Thankfully the house we are in until 12/15 has a dishwasher. We joke that the post 12/15 house has two dishwashers, one named Baker, one named Riley...it has no machine dishwasher, unfortunately. And the two dishwashers of which I speak make a strange whining sound.)

We beg the kids to do homework, clear their places, go to bed, etc...

Once the kids began school (10/1), we also began to settle into some daily routine, which has me writing several hours a day...my work in lieu of CarrotSeed. A screenplay is shaping up into a share-able draft.

And, like many DC-area folks who go to Bethany for a long weekend, we also went away for this past long weekend. Yesterday was "World Culture Day" in Costa Rica. Costa Ricans, and many Latin Americans (particularly those with substantial populations of pre-Columbus natives--most of Central America + the Andes countries, for example) are a bit uncomfortable celebrating the arrival of Columbus because, with his arrival, began the slaughter of millions of Aztec, Maya, Inca and other indios. In the US, where that slaughter was more or less completed, there are not enough natives left to protest the celebration of Columbus' arrival. Down here, where most people trace their roots to both Spanish and Indian roots, it is a bit more troublesome. World Culture Day is a way around that complexity. In other countries, it is called Dia de la Raza--celebrating this day as the birth of a great new race of people of both Spanish and American heritage. A way of uniting, rather than dividing. Nice, I think.

Hope you enjoyed the tangent...So, on this long weekend, we packed up and went to Tamarindo, a hotspot for tourists visiting Costa Rica, that is only 30 miles away as the bird flies but which, during the wet season, requires a 60 or so mile drive. The roads that follow the 30 mile path are just too washed out to cross.

A fun weekend in Tamarindo, where we took a 2-hour boat ride up an estuary and saw numerous blue herons, small crocodiles, a KingFisher, and numerous other birds. Swam in the tiny waves of Tamarindo beach, a change from Nosara's monster waves. Went to a place that billed itself as an animal rescue operation but upon closer inspection seemed, unfortunately, to be a low-end, unregulated zoo. It was home to one of the most beautiful cats we had ever seen--an ocelot as well as to some beautiful toucans, spider monkeys, a peccary and more.

Tara on the beach in Tamarindo

Baker burying Tae in the Tamarindo sand.

See the Ocelot in this video...

On the way home, we stopped at the Maxi-Bodega, a super-store in Nicoya, where we loaded up on a few essentials. We grabbed lunch at the Pollo Rico Rico, whose pollo was indeed rico, though perhaps not rico, rico. The kids played in the park in Nicoya and we grabbed an icecream while Tae and Riley too rode on one a little mechanical donkey...

Tae on the Donkey...

Riley on the Donkey...

So, you see: Life here is quite different:

• roads are not paved.
• the beach is right down the street
• everybody surfs
• the food is different--rice and beans each and every day
• the weather is hot, hot, hot

And: Life here is very much the same (seems like a school assignment...name 5 ways life is similar and different...)

• we get up
• get kids to school
• work
• pay some bills
• get some groceries
• clean stuff up
• pick kids up
• eat dinner
• get kids to bed
• go away for the weekend
• ride mechanical donkeys...

Same or different though, I must say it is all pura vida!

PS. 2 futbol notes: a. The Costa Rica Under 20 team is in the Semi-finals of the Under 20 World cup. Game starts any minute against Brazil. If they win, they go to the finals. Please root for them!

b. The Costa Rica national team (not the under 20s) plays the US National Team tomorrow in DC. Go to the game if you can. Watch it if you can't. And...root for Costa Rica. I know, unpatriotic, but here's the deal. If Costa Rica wins, they make the World Cup. If they lose, they probably will not. The US has already qualified for the World Cup, win or lose tomorrow. So, pull for the ticos and then root for the US should the two teams meet in the actual cup. Gracias!