more plants

cool spherical seed (?) pods

weird yellow plants

School

1. Students wear a school t-shirt, but they get to choose which color, and they can wear whatever pants/skirt they want. Staff members don't have a uniform.

2. Students call teachers by their first names, without "Miss" or "Teacher," etc. Therefore, I am "Abby" and Jerry is "Jerry." Funny thing too. There are more than 19 teachers at school, and only 2 are male, and BOTH have the name Jerry, or Gerry (pronounced the same).

3. The school bus that takes us to school is actually the same mustard yellow that's in the U.S. The difference is that the inside looks nicer (each seat with it's own seat cover) and each seat has a seat belt. Our driver, Hernan, was telling me that it's the law in Costa Rica that children must be seat belted when on a bus. Those who are not children do not have to be seat belted, by law.

4. The school rules are pretty much the same. Be respectful of self, others, and property, don't chew gum, don't use profanity or offensive language, be/act safe, and no running in the halls (all halls are outdoors though).

5. The school rule that is not the same as the U.S. is that all students must take OFF their shoes at the door to their classroom, mostly to avoid tracking in dirt and mud, especially during the rainy season.

Just photos

Gulf of Necoya way out there at sunset (Aug 27)

bug on fuzzy goldfish plant (at school)

Laundry

No wonder the clothes pins are plastic and not wooden! lol It rains too much here for wooden ones to stay looking as clean...

It seems the trick is to start laundry early enough on Friday or Saturday that there's time for it to get the beat of midday sun to dry it well before the afternoon rain falls, and with time to get three loads done each weekend. Yeah, our clothes seem to get dirtier sooner here...

Bugs Inside

4 scorpions so far
2 water bugs, that look like cockroaches
1 weird large brown beetle with two legs missing half their length each*
1 fuzzy cool spider
1 mustard-yellow large beetle*
the usual small spiders, moths, flies, and mosquitos

* Pictures below

large brown beetle missing half of 2 legs

mustard yellow beetle

Mystery #2

What flower or type of plant is this?

It grows fairly tall (blossom above my waist), and I noticed it on the way from the high school classrooms walking down to the middle school area. Sometimes the blossom gets taller (3" tall) and the blossom/colored part seems very sturdy.

First meals

- July 28:  Dinner on the airplane from Texas to Costa Rica (American Airlines) - not Costa Rican but instead American. (first picture)

- July 29:  Breakfast at Hotel Eskalima (FREE!) - Fresh blended-in-house passion fruit juice, fresh blended-in-house orange juice, fresh blended-in-house mixed fruit juice + gallo pinto* + egg(s) + toast with guava jam/jelly, fresh cut pineapple, papaya, and watermelon. (second & fourth picture)

- July 29:  Lunch at a soda (meaning small mom and pop hole-in-the-wall eatery) in Alajuela - one hamburger each + freshly homemade french fries + tap water (potable!) (third picture)

Dinner on the plane- chicken & rice

Breakfast at Hotel Eskalima

Lunch ($3.50 for 2 hamburgers)

Hotel Eskalima- freshly blended fruit juices and milk

Mystery #1

We noticed bird poop on our kitchen table yesterday. It was definitely not there before, we definitely closed the doors at night, and we definitely have not seen a bird fly overhead inside, nor have we heard a bird.

Any ideas as to how the fresh bird poop got on the table? (We had previously cleaned the room QUITE thoroughly.) And yes, it DOES look very much like bird poop, and Jerry would know given that he had a pet bird for quite some time in the past...

First Impressions

My first impressions of here (Monteverde, Costa Rica) were:

Wow,  this is surreal because:

a. It's so incredibly green,  biodiverse, unusual (tropical yet high elevation so not hot), beautiful and nothing like anything I've seen before so seems like we're on a movie set or in another world

AND

b. It's like Nederland (CO) except with a HUGE influx of one group of people that all speak the same language so much so that many signs in town are in both languages (so imagine if Ned had  a significant larger number of Nepalese with more money than locals living in town causing changes like signs to be in English and Nepalese).

I also thought:

1. We are in the middle of nowhere!

2. The school is more "on the map"  than I thought. It seems to be well-known and well-connected. Two American  teachers whom were on the school tour with us today (who are in CR for a month's vacation) are linked to Putney and the private school world...

3. As everyone has said,  Ticos (Costa Ricans) are super nice! This includes all the hotel staff where we stayed for two nights in Alajuela (5 minutes from the airport). They were very helpful, friendly, informative, and accommodating, and the front desk staff are quite proficient in English. If you need a place to stay near the Costa Rican airport, stay at Hotel Eskalima!

4. This is an incredible place to be if you're into nature and art of many kinds! (duh)

5. It's like home in that it's a super small town, (surrounding area population is 7,000 but Monteverde is about 300 people) and there are lots of grass roots efforts. Plus, people are SUPER into protecting the environment here, there's a lot of wind, and you can drink the water and eat the raw produce! Oh, and it's very clean; this is the first Latin American town I've seen without trash in the streets!

There has been little rain so far and with the wind, it doesn't feel that humid for CR. The weather is like home, including a bit chilly at night (65 degrees F last night at 2 am), and just a little more humid than home. I'm sure once it starts raining a lot every day it will feel less like home weather-wise.

Here is the "Centro Comercial" where we first 'landed' when we got to Monteverde.

Flora

As I'm sure you know or can imagine, the plants here are INCREDIBLE! There are bananas growing outside the kitchen at the school, and dark blueish black berries that grown on a tree at school that you can eat called marias. They taste sweet and apparently the kids often eat them.

There are tons of beautiful flowers, ferns, bromeliads, orchids, palms, stick plants, moss, philodendrons, etc. all over the place. The dirt road on the way to our home is lined with bright pink hibiscus, and there are plants growing naturally outside that I grew up knowing as indoor fancy house plants!

ferns, bromeliads, and more

pink hibiscus



Huge ficus tree, or higueron

Fauna

The first morning here at our new home, I saw a toucan, parrots, other birds, my first coatamundi, many hummingbirds, and the two horses that graze very close by.

Within the next few days, I saw tons of colorful butterflies that I'd never seen alive before, including a metallic-like blue butterfly, a few agouti, MANY more coatamundis (called pizotes in Spanish), a red-brown parrot, interesting shiny beetles, and not so new things such as dragonflies, leaf-cutter ants, centipedes, caterpillars, moths, spiders, etc.

Here's the pizote outside our kitchen digging for food. (We named him JC, for Johnny Coatamundi.)

New Home

Here are pictures of our new home.

We are quite lucky to live here! It's spacious, well-lit, and came with a clothes washer, full stove, full fridge (and freezer), and microwave, and even more luxurious, a clothes dryer (stored outside the back/'mud room' door in its own locked space). The kitchen came too with lots of pots, pans, dishes for eating off of, baking with, and storing things in, and utensils including a blender, potato masher, peeler, grater, TWO garlic presses...

We even have a porch swing, camping chair, and an adirondack-like white wooden chair out front!

The shower is pretty 'normal' and same with the toilet and sinks. The only thing different is that we have a side red washroom/laundry room sink too. Guess what?!? We can drink the water here!

living room looking towards kitchen

bedroom (clothes are in open closet)



view from living room and bedroom of clothesline and forest

Beforehand

The month or so before coming down here to beautiful Costa Rica (and indeed the country is rica in beauty!) was spent getting documents ready and trying to pack without knowing entirely what would be available in the small town we're now living in.

The most difficult was trying to get a "Police Letter of Clearance" which, by law apparently, Arizona cannot issue, unlike most states in the USA. This meant we opted for getting the super official FBI Background Checks in hopes that that would trump the AZ-state-only Police Letter. It was also tricky because we have Arizona state driver's licenses (which we needed to update our passports), but I had to get a certified copy of my birth certificate which had to be obtained and apostilled in Colorado, and the FBI Background Checks we had to get through DC, and apostilled in DC.

We luckily got everything together just in time and made an appointment to go to the Costa Rican consulate in NYC to get our official "provisional" (temporary) work visas. After two hours of copying documents and running to the Bank of America to direct deposit money to the consulate office for the visas ($32 per person), we had our visas!

It's still not clear to me what good these temporary visas do given that we still have to apply for permanent work visas, or else we have to leave the country in 30 or 90 days; (the amount of days is not clear). I'm guessing it makes the process faster, hopefully.

So here is a pic of the CR consulate in NYC, and pics of fun had in NYC and upstate... Thanks to my parents, Jerry's family, and P&B!

Welcome Box

When we arrived at our new home (on 7/30/15), there was a welcome box waiting for us from Kathia, the housing coordinator. She left a box in each of our new homes that included food to make a quick hot meal that night, and breakfast the next day! For dinner we had, from our box, pasta with mushroom sauce and canned tuna; breakfast the next morning was organic granola with milk and banana, also all from the box. We were also given eggs, orange juice, salt, sugar, cooking oil, Costa Rican coffee of course*, pineapple, guava jam, bread, butter, one roll of toilet paper, cleaning sponges and dish soap.

*As one of our students at school said, "What?!? You don't drink coffee?!? You must not be from Costa Rica..."