Some photos from the past couple of weeks, as well as a few notes on jungle living that have been rattling around in my brain. I’ve been way too lazy about uploads! You can view more photos here.
Horses wander freely about the town.
Dogs do too!
Our closest beach, Playa Negra, in the late afternoon. The black sand is super fine and gets into everything.
Graham is very dramatic in his refusal to love the beach.
Big, crazy spider in our sink one morning. It hopped at me when I tried to scoop in into a glass. YIKES!
Zach preparing one of the fish he caught. Such a provider!
Finally got close enough to one of the dart frogs to take its picture.
Dean bringing me flowers.
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Both boys are expanding their vocabularies in Costa Rica. Dean is saying dog, cat, thank you, bye, mama, and dada. He also pants like a dog whenever he sees any four-legged creature, and he has started waving. Graham has started saying “chillax.” That’s chill + relax for all you oldsters . As in, “Daddy, it’s time to go to bed and chillax!”
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How humid is it here? Dishes don’t dry in the draining rack. Some of our clothes are mildewing. Books and paper are just slightly damp at all times. Our bathroom is like a swamp.
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The big, exciting news this week is that we are making friends! Graham had his first play date yesterday with an awesome little boy and it was a big success. His parents own the coffee shop in town — could there be a better family to befriend?! They played with rocks and cars, chased each other around the shop, and got ice cream cones. We have some more potential friend irons in the fire as well.
The more time passes since I last wrote, the harder it is to write anything at all, because all my observations are competing for space. This is going to be a hodge podge assortment of ideas, hopefully enough to get me out of “blog debt.”
Simpler, But Not Easier
Life here is simpler than in the States, but simple things are hard. There is less of everything except untamed wilderness: fewer people, less traffic, less media barrage, less stuff to buy, fewer choices. If you had a million dollars down here, nobody would know it because there’s nothing to buy except food, sundries, and what few garments are suitable for sweating it out in the jungle. Imagine, if you will, no Best Buy, no Home Depot, no PetCo, no Old Navy, no Barnes & Noble, no Bed Bath & Beyond. And lo and behold, your life runs perfectly well without them. Living here is uncomplicated, and generally low-stress. However, basic things take a lot of energy. Taking care of the kids here is a lot harder, because it takes both parents to get them out of the house. We don’t have a child care option yet, and no parenting staples like playgrounds and children’s museums. Stocking the refrigerator is a challenge, since we can only carry the equivalent of a single grocery bag in the bicycle basket. We go the various small grocery suppliers almost daily. By the time I have biked home with a full basket, I just want to drink a cold beer and go to sleep!
Bug Update
We’re adapting. Graham’s legs have downgraded from “Fangoria” to “merely bad.” To paraphrase Forrest Gump’s momma, the jungle is like a box of chocolates… We are constantly astonished by the variety and unpredictability of our insect situation. Case in point: two nights ago at dusk the entire house was enveloped in a swarm of moth-like creatures with slender black wings. We hid out for a while under our mosquito nets. It felt like an episode of “Tales from the Crypt.” Within about an hour, they were gone, and the spider camped out above our staircase was exhausted. We’re learning to live side-by-side with our six-legged friends. They are a fact of life here. On the other hand, when one of them flew straight into my right ear at dinner, all the way to my eardrum, I almost lost my mind.
Man’s Place in Nature
The first thing you think when you see this country is “OMG, it’s so beautiful.” After a few days, this evolves to “I am a stranger here, and Nature wants to eat me.” Now that we’re four weeks in, I can feel another transition. “Holy crap, I am an animal too! I really do belong here; growing up in a manmade world made me forget how.” I am becoming attuned to the natural world in subtle ways. For example, we had two straight days of rain this week. This morning, I knew the rain was finished because the cicadas were making a racket, which they never do while it’s wet. We don’t have any clocks. Honestly, we tell the time by looking at the sky.
In our time here in Puerto Viejo, I’ve noticed something interesting about the energy parents put into keeping their kids safe. Kids here seem to have a lot more freedom than children the same age in the States. You see little kids riding adult bikes by themselves, or playing in the street together (the quiet side streets — they’re not dodging traffic or anything), or walking through town. You also see a lot of parents biking with their kids perched any which way on the handlebars. I saw a mom riding down the main street one day with a small boy standing behind her holding on with one hand. He looked blissfully confident. I’ve seen one baby carried in a carseat bucket, and that was a tourist family. Overall, I don’t think carseats are widely used here, though I haven’t researched it. The playground in town has really overgrown grass (snakes!), broken swings, rusted ladder rungs, etc.
I’m enjoying this in certain small ways. I love that on the property here Graham can be out of my sight and I feel comfortable that he’s safe as long as I know where he is. He’s not a huge risk taker, so he always comes back into my line off vision shortly. Even Dean can wander way more freely here than at home. The couple of times we’ve had a ride into town with the kids, there was no question that we’d bring the carseats. We did have them strapped in on the way from San Jose — my heart would never have been able to take the lane changes otherwise! — but they’re currently gathering dust upstairs.
Certain things are different here that make these safety things palatable. The drives have been short and slow. It’s a TINY town (I see the same people all the time) and people know each other and their kids. Cars are very accustomed to sharing the road with bikes and pedestrians and are generally very courteous. But it definitely puts an interesting perspective on things. I spent hours researching car seats when it was time to switch Graham into something bigger. I wouldn’t dream of leaving Dean unsupervised in our front yard in Texas. Yet maybe when we get back I’ll a slightly less paranoid mama? Who knows…
In an interesting twist, apparently Americans are much more cavalier about babysitters than the Ticos. I thought it would be easy to find some part-time babysitting here, but the idea was met with… well, not horror by our hostess, but no recommendations either. “I don’t know who I could trust — I mean, it’s your children!” were her exact words, if I recall correctly. Pretty different from the “Hey, that kid down the street looks old enough to dial 9-1-1,” approach to hiring sitters that a lot of Americans have. (For the record, our sitters in TX have all come from trusted recommendations or with references, but I haven’t been running their prints or anything.) The only lead on a babysitter I’ve been able to get down here was from a woman who looked suspiciously like a “lady of the evening” who solicited me as I biked through town with Dean one day. Hmmm.
My parents arrived in the jungle two days ago and are surviving — nay, thriving — amongst the bugs and humidity. I am very impressed! My mom’s favorite plants, bromeliads, thrive here, and they are having some enviable wildlife sightings.
To celebrate Father’s Day, we took a family trip to the Finca la Isla Botanical Garden. It’s right next store to us, and is a real treasure for the neighborhood. We’ll be going again many times.
Photos from the visit:
At the end of the visit, we sampled bananas, star fruits, chocolate, and juice, all of which were made on site. It was an awesome adventure!
Those of you who have been to our house in the past… well, ever, will probably be amused to know that here in the jungle I sweep a minimum of three times a day. It’s the first thing I do after I get dressed in the morning, I do it after every meal and snack, and it’s usually necessary on at least one random occasion during the day.
You see, living in a house with rather arbitrary walls and a serious ant population, any little crumb or dead bug can lead to a Biblical-scale number of insect scavengers in the blink of an eye. Dirt, too, is a problem, but mainly it’s the ants. In this reality, there is no leaving the dishes in the sink overnight or being casual about the smooshed cracker under the table. Heck, even with all these precautions, there’s a continuous stream of ants marching across our countertops and scouting our floors in hopes that Dean left them a morsel.
That’s not the only thing that’s different. We can’t flush toilet paper here, so the bathroom trash must be changed daily. There’s no dishwasher (no great loss, since the one at home is so ineffective). No vacuum (oh, how I miss my Dyson!). And of course, the kiddos are still doing their very best to trash the house every waking moment. I could easily spend half my time on housekeeping each day, but I value my sanity more than a clean home. On the plus side, our hosts’ housekeeper is coming to clean for us tomorrow for the insanely low rate of $2/hour. I am pretty darn psyched about that! We have the option of hiring her once a week while we’re here, and I think I’d be a fool not to.
One thing that has been interesting about keeping house in the jungle is the laundry. To refresh your memories, here’s the laundry sink:
If I want to wash clothes, I carry them outside to the sink, then scrub them by hand with a little detergent, rinse, and put them on the clothesline to dry. This process must be started at the crack of dawn if you want to have any hope of having the clothes dry that day. It’s so humid here in the afternoon that clothes have to come off the line by about 2, regardless of whether they’re dry. If they aren’t I hang them around the house and put them back on the line the following morning. It’s surreal to have this much planning going into laundry!
Our hosts do have a little laundry service here on the property. It’s awesome to drop off clothes in the morning and have them delivered fresh and folded that afternoon. The catch is that it is very expensive. Consider this — last week I paid $15 for a bag of laundry that I could have easily fit into a single load in my washer at home. $15! And yet I’ll be paying about $10 tomorrow for someone to clean my house top to bottom…. the economy here is weird.
One of the things that is fascinating and different about life in Puerto Viejo is how easy it is to cut out the middle man from many transactions. Want fruit? There are several stands in town — or maybe you just want to go out into your front yard. Interested in fish? Go hang out on the beach at the right time and you’ll have your choice of fishmongers coming in with their fresh catch. You can even have them deliver to your home on a regular basis. (We have yet to set this up, but we are definitely interested!) We attended the farmer’s market last weekend, and we met the local tofu supplier; yesterday was our first delivery.
A kilo is the minimum amount required for home delivery, so we went for it. It’s harder to get ethical meat here, so we would, ideally, like to be eating more fish and tofu anyway. The tofu dude is a character. He seems like he might be perpetually… shall we say, in an altered state of consciousness? And yet, he has a thriving soy enterprise, complete with business card! (The card, btw, has been adapted. Apparently he used to be a musician, but his credentials have been Sharpied out and replaced with the word “TOFU.”)
Anyhoo, we got our delivery yesterday and tonight Zach cooked some up in a delicious thai green curry. It was awesome! I really love how fresh so much our produce has been here, and now that we’re getting these homemade tofu deliveries I think we’re set! Oh, and did I mention that the lecheria, where we get the homemade ice cream, also sells organic dairy products like milk and butter? That place is quickly becoming our home away from home.
I just have to get this off my chest. What you don’t see in our beautiful photos of “paradise” is that we are antagonized, harassed, molested, plagued by insects. Elizabeth said before that she thinks the plants rule the jungle. I think the insects rule the jungle, and they use the plants for housing and the human beings for convenient snacks. I have been reduced to a bag of blood and other precious fluids for bugs to enjoy.
In the nine months we spent researching Costa Rica and preparing for the trip, nothing made mention of the fact that insect repellent is not much more than a feeble joke to the local mosquitoes. Nobody told me my wife and four-year-old son were going to look like victims of the pox, and both want to rip their skins off. Weirdly, I am almost unaffected. I guess I don’t taste good, and Dean seems to have some of my tolerance. But I would rather they would come for me than my Elizabeth and my Graham. Especially Graham, who has around three-score welts on his arms and legs and scratches them until they become weeping sores. I want this to be a fun summer for him. I certainly didn’t set all this up to subject my little boy to an exotic form of torture.
It’s not all bad news. The situation seems to be improving, so I think we’re all developing a better resistance. We learned that we can secure Graham’s mosquito net to his bed with clothespins so he doesn’t kick it off during the night. Some days are much better than others. We’ll get mosquitoes one day, and gnats the next. Always ants, but at least they’re only after our provisions, not us. The jungle doesn’t need a weather forecast, it needs a bug forecast.
I hope I’m not being too negative. There are plenty of things to love about our setting, this just doesn’t happen to be one of them. This is going to go on the record as one of the prices to pay for the experiences we’re enjoying.
One of the ways the Internet is changing the world is that it enables working, communicating, and conducting business transactions across great distances. One of the things I’m experimenting with here in Costa Rica is a little economic sleight of hand. The reason we can stay here for an extended period is not because we have a large savings (haha, that’s a good one), but that thanks to the Internet, I can continue to work for my U.S. clients and draw funds from my U.S. bank. It is something of a juggling act, but here’s how it works:
I do some work. Once I have made some useful software, the resulting code is transmitted over the network to one of my university clients.
They send me a check. It would be a lot easier if they paid me electronically (like with PayPal), but these are large bureaucratic institutions and they do things the way they do them. I use a mail handling service called Earth Class Mail which receives my mail and scans it, so I can see any checks or business letters on the web.
I deposit the funds electronically. I pay a monthly fee to use the same electronic funds transfer network that your gas company or your credit card company uses to automatically withdraw an amount from your checking account. I use the scanned image of the paper check to get the account number and bank routing number to initiate the transaction.
I transfer funds from my business bank to my personal bank. I can do this quickly and easily from my bank’s website.
I wasn’t sure this would all work until a couple of days ago, when I completed my first payment. From the moment my client puts a check in the mail to the moment I can go to the ATM and turn my hard work into ice cream and rum, it takes sixteen days to go through my Rube Goldberg system.
The upshot of all this is that I am warping some old, reliable rules of economics: that the income you earn and your cost-of-living are both tied to your location. In a country where the minimum wage is $2 an hour, I still draw a U.S. salary. And by the way, the demand for my software skills here in Puerto Viejo is absolutely zero!
We’re not exactly cleaning up financially; We’re still paying our mortgage and all the bills back in Texas. But I now know the model works, and it’s giving us a very memorable summer abroad.
. As in, “Daddy, it’s time to go to bed and chillax!” 
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