What are we doing in Costa Rica?

… To Puerto Viejo! I have some photos that need sharing.

First of all, here’s Charla the spider. She lived at the top of the stairs for our last two weeks or so. Graham was very fond of her.

Next up, this stick bug was the biggest we — or our hosts — had ever seen. It crawled across the living room floor one morning, up the door frame, and then hung out until we went to bed. In the morning it had vanished. 

And finally, here’s a visual of why we were desperate to leave early. Happily, he is healing.

Last Friday was Mother’s Day in Costa Rica. I didn’t think much about it at first, but after being wished “feliz dia de madre!” by a few Ticos, I was quite into enjoying my special day — I’m so easily influenced! 

In the morning I took the boys hiking in the Santa Elena Cloud Forrest Reserve while Zach worked. It was a perfect outing. They have a 1.4 km youth trail that was just long and challenging enough to be fun. Graham led the way with boundless enthusiasm; carrying Dean in the Ergo, I lagged behind just a bit. It was so indescribably beautiful. The pictures I’m posting don’t begin to do it justice. After the first trail, we took a break at the reception area, got something to drink, and the boys talked me into some stuffed monkeys. Then we hiked some more! 

In the afternoon we visited the used bookstore/cafe/laundromat in town, then picked up some Japanese food for dinner. I finished up the evening with a trashy novel and some chocolate-covered macadamias while a massive storm thundered all around us. It was a perfect day! 

Photos from the forrest. Our interwebs here are too slow for me to post individually, so here’s a slideshow. 

Belated Feliz Dia de Madre to all my beloved mamas out there!

With a midwife bat to help! The boys and I learned that and other interesting facts about bats this morning at the Monteverde Bat Jungle. We saw hundreds of bats eating, flying, drinking, and grooming on the tour, followed by a kids’ movie about bats. It was so much fun!

I’m sorry there’s been a post about poop at the top of the blog for a week! We’ve been busy! 

We’re now in Monteverde, a charming town perched high in the mountains. There are a few mosquitos, but nothing to write home (or blog) about. For that reason alone I would be happy to be here, but there’s also a fair amount of interesting sights for the whole family, as well as wonderful, cool, non-humid weather. Ah! 

We decided last week that we needed to get out of Puerto Viejo a week earlier than planned. The air was saturated with mosquitos. Graham’s bitten legs were beyond horrifying. We could. not. escape. That plus a desire to see more of this interesting country led to a flurry of last-minute plan making. Here’s a quick run-down of the past few days:
Friday: Book rental car. Start packing up entire house.
Saturday: Collect car, make hotel reservations for Alajuela (stopover on Sunday night) and Monteverde. Pack a lot more.
Sunday: Finish packing. Leave. Drive for 5+ hours. Spend night in Alajuela. Elizabeth comes down with food-poisoning-like illness. 
Monday: Zach, too, is afflicted. We load up on Immodium and drive to Monteverde. (Last hour is on a BUMPY road. Whoo hoo!).  Feeling better. 
Tuesday: Elizabeth comes down with mystery fever in the night, perhaps related to earlier woes. Spends day in bed feeling rotten. Zach wrangles children, secures rental house for the week, and locates an episode of Gilmore Girls on the TV for Elizabeth. Wins husband of the year award.
Wednesday: We move into cool, quirky tree house in Monteverde. Our nice landlady rents us the top, two-bedroom apartment and throws in a lower, one-room one for free for the kids to play in. Score! We settle in. Takes a long time to get internet access up and running, but this is finally achieved. 

Our plan is to stay here for a week and then spend our last 4-5 nights in the country in the Central Valley. After that, it’s home, sweet home. Nice as Monteverde is, we can’t wait for Texas.

Poop of unknown (but clearly small animal) origin. Oh my.

I keep meaning to post pictures of some of our favorite signs/packaging. Consider this part one in a series.

Just kidding — we like nature!

This blog has focused disproportionately on bugs, or rather the bites the inflict, so I thought you might enjoy hearing about one of our more interesting insect encounters.

The kids were asleep one night last week, and Zach and I were enjoying an actual adult conversation. (Remember those? They’re nice!) As I was making an erudite observation, or perhaps drawing a breath before expounding upon my theories of the universe, I looked up and saw something.  

“What is that?!?” I squawked. 

We stared at it. From down on the sofa, it looked a little like a white bat. Or an alien. It was kind of gross. Maybe it was there to eat our faces? 

Because I’m scientifically minded, I climbed up on a chair to try for a closer look. Also, I needed blog fodder, so I wanted to take a picture. I know how much our friends and families love to be grossed out! 

We bandied about some theories as to just what the heck this thing was. Zach was sure pretty quickly that it was an insect, and for a few minutes we thought we had interrupted an intimate moment between two bugs. But why was the one we could see clearly so oogy? And why were they such different shapes? Was this an unholy union? And would one or both bugs seek bloody revenge for the interruptus? Only time — and a handy flashlight — would tell. 

We continued our examination. The creature had grasshopper-like legs, but its wings were floppy and wet looking, and its body was shrimp-like. Finally, Zach had a brilliant insight. “It’s shedding!” he cried. I ran to the computer and started googling to confirm. And indeed, that was what we were witnessing.  (You can witness it too!)

Unfortunately, all our pictures are from several feet away at an odd angle. But other people have gotten better shots. For example: here and here and here. This one is the most like what we saw. We continued to check in with our little friend for the next couple of hours. As we retired for the evening, he was eating his discarded skin. Bon appetit! 

Speaking of eating, here’s a bonus pic for the squeamish. The kids and I saw this at the botanical garden the other day.

Even spiders have to eat, you know!

I taught Graham to use his fingers for spraying, something I’m sure I’ll come to regret. 

 

Famous last words: “Don’t point that thing at anyone else!”

We’re here for too long. We’re not here for long enough. 

Someone once told me that it takes two years after a move to make a place feel like home. That was certainly true for me when we moved to San Marcos; it took quite a while to settle in, make new friends, and feel like it was home. I’ve grown to love it there. We have amazing friends, I have no trouble filling the days with things to do with the kids, and I feel like a part of the community. But for much of the first year I felt isolated and grumpy. 

We’re now 2/3 of the way through our Costa Rican summer, and the current plan is to spend our last 10 days in the center of the country. That means we only have ~16 days left here. It’s nostalgia time! We can now take inventory of what we’ve experienced and learned. What will we miss? What won’t we?

On the one hand, I feel like three or four weeks would have given me an ample taste of like on the Caribbean coast. That part of me feels like we should have divided our time equally between several areas of the country. It wouldn’t have been a bad approach. Some of my complaints about the trip would have been irrelevant, or else I would have had the distraction of changes in scenery to ease them. 

On the other hand, I think the best kind of travel is that which allows you to get a taste of what it’s like to live in a place, not just visit it.  Would I have gotten that with just a two or three week visit? I think not. We wouldn’t have bothered to settle in, arrange tofu deliveries, or make friends. And if we weren’t about to leave, we would be experiencing so much more here. I know that on some levels we’ve only scratched the surface. Having our own home here, the kids attending school, finding work locally, etc, would all have been interesting and enlightening, I’m sure. We’ve been straddling two worlds rather than fully plunging into this one, and of course that affects the experience. 

Three months is a long time. Graham was talking again today about how much he misses our home in Texas. He wants to see his friends, sleep in his own bed, know what the days will bring. I miss the people, the pets (including our poor Frida dog, who just had her surgery!), the luxuries of middle class American life. But I’m glad we did this. Three months is short in the context of an entire lifetime, and I’m glad to have spent them doing something so unique.

• I have not really improved my Spanish skills while we’re here. I have, however, gotten very good at combining my random Spanish vocabulary words with expressive and inventive sign language. So I’m making myself understood — and making a fool of myself, I’m sure. Oh, and I’m ok with numbers now.
• We’ve been eating way too much junk food. We can’t stop sampling all the brands of Costa Rican cookies. Oh, and visiting the ice cream stand. Mmmm.
• I think I’m going to cry when we get back home and I see our ugly, barren yard. But then I’ll step inside and see our cozy home and feel all better.
• Right now I’m blogging when I should be doing study questions for my midwifery school module. Oh for shame!