Advertisement
Published: August 8th 2006
Back to School...Yay!!
Here they are, back to school again... except this time, Ellie's wearing the same uniform as Ari. She changed schools to start the new school year with Ari...and go on the bus. The kids just started school again last Monday. Thank G-d. Not that we didn’t have a great vacation - we did - it’s just that now I know why camp was invented. We alternated from doing touristy stuff to hanging around the house (heading into cabin-fever land). Ari had a week off while Ellie finished school, then we were all home for a week, then to the beach for a couple days and on to Nicaragua, then back at home for a week, then a visit from Nana and Pop-pop, and, whew, back to school.
For the weeks they were at home, the kids were definitely getting a little stir crazy (or maybe I was the one getting stir crazy). There aren’t any camps for them to go to aside from a couple morning workshops that Ari went to at the Inbioparque (same as the kids went to in January). So they ran around the house, bouncing of the walls screaming until one of them got hurt, then there was more screaming. Concrete wall and tile floors do not dampen the sound of two little ones. I guess we could have just let them sit and watch TV, but that
Happy Kindergarten (Prep) Girl
No problem getting off to school this year! Here's the happy girl waiting for the bus and goofing around. They call kindergarten "Prep" here...so she's officially a kindergartner now...Mom almost cried. would have been too easy (and, believe me, they would have just sat and watched TV all day, even in Spanish). This was definitely when we missed our big yard and friends in the neighborhood and nearby. We did try to get a couple play dates set up, but nothing worked out.
On the other hand, we really enjoyed our travels. Our first trip was to Tamarindo, a beach on the northern Pacific coast of Costa Rica. This was an area we hadn’t explored at all and had heard great things about the beaches. We were a little wary, however, because we’d heard plenty of stories about how bad the roads are out that way. They, actually, turned out to not be very bad - granted we didn’t go to the most remote parts.
On the way we made a quick side trip to Guatil, an out-of-the-way village that has a popadopouly in the pre-Colombian art of pottery making. Ok, I know, you’ve clicked on Google then rushed to your dictionary and now you’re scratching you’re head saying, “What’s a popadopouly?” The short answer is that it is an economic model developed by a trio of extremely observant,
The Stupid, Smelly Bus?
For you Junie B. Jones readers, you'll be familiar with Junie B's anxiety about the bus when she started kindergarten. Well, our bus isn't yellow (a big part of the problem for Junie B)...and it's apparently not smelly...I think Ellie was almost as excited about going on the bus as going to her new school. perceptive and intuitive budding economists. It happened, a long time ago - summer of 1990 maybe. Dara, our friend Jon and I were traveling through Greece - yeah, yeah, tough life, deprived childhood, etc. In Athens, it seemed that there were a ton of hardware stores. I didn’t do an exact count, but I estimate there were about 2 per block. Conversely, a loaf of bread was virtually impossible to find - and one of our staples for the bread and cheese sandwiches on which we pretty much lived. We finally did find 1 bakery, and of course the line was out the door and down the block. The economics were easy to spot: nascent entrepreneurs, looking for a market to break into, would look at the bakery and say to themselves, “That’s not a good business to go into - no one likes to wait on line.” Then they’d see a hardware store (hard for them not to), have the light bulb flash of inspiration in their brains and think, “When a customer goes into a hardware store, they get served right away and they must like that. Let’s open a hardware store!” So that is what a popadopouly
Cheers!
We celebrated Ari's actual birthday with our new friends in Tamarindo with a pizza dinner near the pool and then smoothies and ice cream from a little stand in town. That's Ben in the back, Eamon in front of him and Anna closest to the camara. Another good birthday... is - lots of the same stores all together. By the way, the name comes from George Popodopoulos, the father in that annoying TV show of the times, Webster. (Oh, yeah, I think there was a famous guy with that name, too.) So this little village, Guatil, about 5 miles off the main road, is filled with little workshops/stores that make pottery the same way they have for centuries. We did stop in one of the workshops and the couple that worked there explained how they grind up certain rocks to make the clay and pigment-paints and how they make the pots on a small hand-turned wheel. It was interesting and the kids got to play with some clay.
Well, from there it wasn’t far to our hotel. Owing to an early start (I won’t scare you by telling you how early) we arrived at our hotel by noon. After we checked in, as we headed toward our bungalow, we saw that the pool had a bunch of kids in it - some speaking English and some Spanish. So, of course, we got our suits on as quickly as we could and joined the fun. The Spanish speaking kids
Filadelfia!
On the way to Liberia, we drove (quickly) through Filadelfia. Not quite like home...Here's the bomba (gas station) and there's not much else to it... were the children of the owner of the hotel and were just getting out as we got in. The others, Ben, 11, Eamon, 9, and Anna, 6, were a family that were vacationing from West Virginia. All the kids were a little shy at first, but quickly became friends.
As we chatted with the parents, we told them that we were living in Costa Rica for the year. They looked at each other, smiled, and said, “We are thinking about doing the same thing!” This was their “come to check it out” trip - a trip we never made. We ended up hanging out with this family for much of the 3 days we spent there and talked to them about the goods and bads of Costa Rica. They were very nice and seemed like normal people - hey, if they are thinking about doing it, maybe what we did wasn’t so crazy.
Ari and I hit the beach to ride the waves a couple times. Even though we drove hours and hours to visit these beaches, Ellie wasn’t interested. She was content to stick with the pool. So we swam, we went to a nearby animal-rescue center/zoo
Really hot...
Our trip to Rincon de la Vieja was REALLY cool. Fumeroles, heat vents spewing boiling water and mud, bubbling pools smelling of sulphur...neat! so Ben, Eamon and Anna could see some monkeys and just overall had a very nice time. The kids really enjoyed hanging out with the other kids.
From there, we headed up to Liberia, the main town in northwestern Costa Rica. It is really nothing special - just the biggest town that the Pan-American Highway runs through, so it was the place where we’d catch the bus to Nicaragua. Before stopping for the night, though, we took another little side trip up to Rincon de la Vieja National Park. This was a very cool volcanic area that is the Yellowstone of Costa Rica. As seems the usual national park predicament, we had the choice of a too short hike or a too long hike and again we decided to forge ahead with the long hike. Like a scene from a bad sit-com, again we got caught in the rain as we were out on the hike. And, again, like the happy ending of a sit-com, the kids did a great job on the hike and we got to see some really cool stuff - bubbling hot springs, boiling mud pools and steamy volcanic vents - all laced with a
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...
You just can't capture it well in pictures, but here's one of the muddy, steaming, boiling and bubbling pools we saw...just turn a corner in the woods, and all of a sudden there they are. nice rotten-egg scent. The pictures really don’t do them justice.
The next day we caught the bus and headed up to Nicaragua. We took the bus rather than driving because we had heard that crossing the border in your own car takes a huge amount of paperwork and government approvals. The bus, anyway, was easy. An hour and a half ride to the border, about two hours hanging around at the border waiting for each country to do the necessary paperwork, then another hour and a half ride to Granada.
We’d heard good things about Granada, and we weren’t disappointed. It is a quaint, friendly city on the shores of Lake Nicaragua - one of the biggest fresh-water lakes in the world (well, top 15, anyway). As a sign of our true adventurousness, we arrived without a hotel reservation (I know, crazy!). Well, we kind of had a hotel reservation, but it was for the wrong night and we’d never sent them our credit card to hold it. So we headed over to a hostel that the manager of the hotel in Tamarindo had recommended for us. Luckily, they had 1 room available so we grabbed it. And
Traversing rivers
OK..maybe it's not a river...maybe more like a stream. But still, it was fun. We had to cross to continue on the path at Rincon de la Vieja to see more of the fumeroles and pools. we were very glad we did - not that if we hadn’t grabbed it we wouldn’t have found a place to stay - there were plenty of places around - but we ended up really liking this one. It has a narrow entrance hall that opens into a relaxing courtyard filled with trees, hammocks and wicker furniture. In addition, they have a row of about 10 computers free for anyone to use and a small pool in the back (nice for a quick dip, but that was about it).
We’d been there for about 10 minutes, just relaxing in the courtyard (or Ari might have gone off to check his e-mail - you know how he hates to be out of touch) when we found Max, 8, and Stella, 6. They are from British Columbia and were in the middle of their month-long Nicaragua vacation (with their parents, of course, and their grandparents were arriving that night, too). It turns out that they had lived in north-central Mexico for 2 years. Yep, just picked up and did it. So either there are more people out there that are as crazy as we are or maybe we’re not so crazy.
Waiting for the bus
We left our car in Liberia for our trip to Nicaragua and took the bus. It was pretty nice - air conditioning, comfy seats, movie playing, bathroom. Well, the bathroom part we could have lived without...it started to smell horribly the last 20 minutes of the ride to Granada. P-U! Hmmm.
As you can imagine, the kids became fast friends. Playing cards, playing on the computers, swinging in the hammocks, just being kids.
One day in Granada, we took a little boat ride among the isletas - a smattering of over 300 little islands scattered in a corner of Lake Nicaragua. We got to scramble over the ruins of an old colonial fort, pick mangos off the trees as we trolled by and ogle the fancy houses that some (mostly foreigners) have built on these little islands. Another day we headed out to Laguna Apoya, a large lake nestled in an old volcano’s crater not far outside of Granada. This place is fantastic - the water is crystal clear and toasty warm - the lake is warmed by volcanic vents.
We really lucked out, both in Tamarindo and in Granada, hooking up with other families that we really got along with. We really had a good time -- watching the kids enjoy themselves, talking to the other parents about Costa Rica and our experiences, and seeing that there are plenty of other people out there that are thinking about or who have done what we did. Probably
A gourmet snack
Enjoying some graham crackers (or their equivalent down here) on the bus. just getting out of our usual grind in Heredia (yeah, we’ve only been here 7 months, but we’d gotten into a pretty regular routine), meeting some new people and seeing some new things also had a lot to do with it.
After that trip, we hung out at home for another week and then Nana and Pop-pop (my parents) came for a visit. Tune in next time to hear about that exciting adventure!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 6; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0374s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
