Rachel and I just finished our first round of language immersion classes. The course consisted of 20 hours of classes over 2 weeks. We went from really floundering to get anything done to actually functioning in day to day life (alright Rachel is having trouble, but she admits that she is not great with new languages). We have been able to contract workers and order all of our bathroom supplies, to even be at a point where we can bargain prices in stores. I really realized that my capacity to communicate had changed a few days ago when I was throwing [View Full Entry]

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Last night Rachel complained that the toilet in the master bedroom wouldn’t stop running. So, figuring it was a quick-fix, I opened the top just as the tank was about to overflow. So I flushed the water down and started trying to figure out why the float wouldn’t turn off the flow of water. While working on the problem, the toilet started to overflow again, so I figured that I would just turn it off at the wall, preferring to work on it in the morning. As soon as I turned the shutoff valve, something let go inside the valve and [View Full Entry]

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Mike’s been spending a lot of time with Jorge, our mechanic, working on the truck to get her ready for our adventure. The other day, Jorge’s friend Carlos stopped over and invited everyone to have lunch at his father’s house up the mountain. When he said “up” the mountain, that’s seriously what he meant. Carlos’ father, José Luis, works for the government-run telephone service. The company owns a piece of land on the very top of a mountain called Cerro Chompipe, where it has a telephone tower. José Luis’ job is basically to maintain the tower [View Full Entry]

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It’s strange to be the boss. In the states, I have always been an underling, never holding any real power, and never in charge of people’s livelihoods. Being a Gringo, we are looked at as being really wealthy, regardless of our household income. The truth is, that when you consider that most people here make about $2/hour, most Gringos are wealthy. Yesterday this really hit home. We have two painters working on the house, and our cleaning lady was here working. Then our gardener showed up, and we had 4 employees working here asking for direction and approval. The gardener sta [View Full Entry]

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It sometimes feels that all we do is shop. Last week we bought 6 sinks for the new bathrooms, and a ton of lighting fixtures. We finally got our microwave, and have even started to buy some of the non-perishables for the inn. Today we went out and bought 26 gallons of paint… enough for the entire house. Unfortunately, we still cannot find anyone to paint or build for us. I guess starting a business is always expensive, but while some businesses have a lot of long-term expenses, our business requires most of the money to be spent up-front, and that’s [View Full Entry]

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On Saturday night we met 2 young expat couples to go to a festival/carnival in the local town. On first glance it looked like any other carnival with some dangerous looking rides, overpriced “tchotchkes” and games that are impossible to win. After a few minutes we began to notice that a lot of the stands were selling masks that some of the kids and many of the drunks were wearing. We found out that these masked “marauders” actually run through the festival during the daily parades beating onlookers with pig-bladders that they inflate with either water or air. Today w [View Full Entry]

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We’ve bought a truck! All the time spent weeding through trucks that weren’t exactly right for us, has finally paid off. Narrowing our search down helped as well as we had done additional research on the 4Runners, Landcruisers and Pathfinders. We found that the Landcruisers, while great to look at, had very bad gas mileage and had extremely poor emissions. Pathfinders faired better however their long term reliability wasn’t as good as the Toyotas. 4Runners however seemed to be exactly what we were looking for as they had decent gas mileage in the 4 cylinder, had excellent lon [View Full Entry]

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This past week we spent the beginning of the week preparing for House Hunters to come and tape our house. It was a mad rush of cleaning up to make it look like we had never brought anything of our own into the house. We started taping on Wednesday, and that continued through today and really ate up a good portion of all of these days, leaving us with little time to take care of necessary errands. The taping was so much harder than any of us had expected. Rachel had a hard time saying what she liked and disliked in [View Full Entry]

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We never made it to the contractor, nor did we get to do any fun/touristy stuff on Sunday or any other day this week. Sunday we spent the whole day driving around Costa Rica looking for stores that we never found. It should have served as a preview for what lay in store for the rest of our week. Monday, we drove around shopping for all sorts of stuff, finding some of what we had been looking for to turn the house into a working inn. We also had our first Spanish class scheduled, but in true Tico style the teacher [View Full Entry]

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Last Saturday rolled around like any other day here in Barva. Mike and I made our way over to the Delgado’s to have some lunch at about noon and chat up the family a bit. Little did we know that Gerardo had other plans for us. By the time we got to the house, Agnes (one of the daughters) had told us lunch would be ready in about an hour. Gerardo seized this opportunity to convince us to go to the bar with him for a beer while we waited. I was hesitant at first, knowing full well that he meant [View Full Entry]

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