The longest week of our lives

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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 never showed up, and after a half hour he rescheduled for Tuesday.

Tuesday I spent almost two hours at the government-run phone company working to change the phone lines over to our names. After waiting in a DMV style line with chairs, numbers and all and wasting most of my day, they told me that my residency status meant that I was unable to change the phones. Of course when I got home I found that after giving them my information they had proceeded to not only be unhelpful at the office, they had, in fact, turned off my phone. We also met with a decorator- I did not think hiring her would be a good idea, but I allowed Rachel to go ahead with it, scheduling our first shopping session for Thursday (even at $50/hour). We ended the day with our first Spanish class, which went very well.

Wednesday was the best day of the week; we got a lot of our errands taken care of and met with the resettlement agency. Rachel has been getting overwhelmed with the Spanish, but I think that it’s going well. We have really been able to get around much better even after only two classes.

Thursday was one of the roughest and most expensive days either of us has had in a long time.

We got up early to make it to a meeting that we had scheduled with the synagogue. We had wanted to discuss membership and getting supervision for the hotel, but upon getting there we were told that we needed a letter from our Rabbi before even getting in the door- I guess this is just another version of Tico-Time, but dealing with that has still not gotten any easier.

Then we met with our interior decorator. That’s when the true disaster began. We explained to her that we wanted as much local merchandise as we could get. Costa Rican craftwork is beautiful and in the right places, it’s wonderfully priced. For some reason this translated to her as “let’s buy the most expensive imported furniture that we can find”. The places we went to had their prices in dollars; clearly these places were catering exclusively to wealthy Americans. We had found normal-priced stuff that we liked when we were shopping on our own. She was stuck on showing us $1000 chandeliers, considering that we need 8 of them, they were well out of our price range. After the torture of arguing with this woman for 4 hours we parted ways, never to see her again.
We went from there to the only kosher restaurant in the country, for some of the best deli we have ever had. Then off to a Marshall’s style place, we had some great finds, and the day seemed to be on an upswing, until I hit a car in the parking lot… 2 hours and $140 later, we were on our way home.

I guess it’s going to be a rollercoaster, as things always are. Friday was a far better day, we have a new Spanish teacher and he’s really spectacular, so hopefully things will get better and we’ll be able to communicate better in the near future.


Matt


Orchid Lodge's Website - http://www.theorchidlodge.com
Click here to read our blog - http://blog.theorchidlodge.com

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Comments

[lindsey]

que loco
dude! i've been wondering about you two out there. i'm glad that things are coming along (despite the bumps along the way). i know everything will work out in the end. i hope you had a great birthday! email me soon with more adventures. i'll update you on boring grad school stuff! abrazos