25 Sure Signs You Are Becoming Accustomed to Life in Rural Costa Rica

I saw this and had to post it to our blog.

We live in Atenas and it is pretty rural.

It ain't the sticks, but the population is not very high and most people work in the agricultural arena
Please feel free to add your “Sure Signs” in the comments section below. Pura vida!

25 Sure Signs You Are Becoming Accustomed to Life in Rural Costa Rica

1. You were never considered a “morning person,” but now you don’t even require an alarm clock; the sun beaming into your bedroom window and the birds chirping wake you up quite consistently. And they require no electricity (see Sure Sign #2).

2. You stop assuming water and electricity are available every day. Instead, when you wake up, you switch on the light and faucet to see if either or both are working. You learn to keep an extra bottle of water (or five) handy.

3. Butterflies are a part of your bedroom decor. Not the plastic or fabric kind; the flying, fluttering, living kind.

4. When you see a few ants floating in your tea, you don’t dump the tea; you spoon the ants out and keep drinking.

5. You take your rain jacket or an umbrella everywhere. Even when the sun is shining.

6. You stop cursing the rain and are actually grateful for it. It is, after all, the reason much of Costa Rica is such a gorgeous green.

7. You schedule outdoor activities some time between 6 AM and 1 PM.

8. Instead of squashing the creepy crawlies you find in your house, you either let them be, chase them outside, or capture and release them. Advanced move: You lean in for a closer look to see what new creatures you are sharing your home with.

9. You put meetings on hold to see what species of bird is singing outside the office.

10. You stop wearing moisturizer. All of that moisture in the air is doing a damn good (and free) job of keeping your skin hydrated.

11. Your decision about what to wear involves this rule: If there are no visible stains on an article of clothing and you don’t cringe when smelling it, it’s clean.

12. You stop gripping the seat, door, or dash every time you get in any type of transportation. Or you at least lessen your grip a bit.

13. When you wake up to an unknown insect crawling on your arm, you don’t shriek; you brush it off and go back to sleep.

14. You stop buying all your fruit from the store and start pulling it from the trees.

15. You stop expecting people to show up “on time” and you switch your internal clock to Tico Time. If you really need someone to meet you at a specific time, you tell them a time earlier than your actual meeting time.

16. You have more bug bites than freckles.

17. You always have rice ready.

18. When you are out on a jog and hear a low, barking sound, you don’t look around on the ground for a dog; you look up in the trees for the howler monkeys.

19. You wash your clothes at least two days in advance of when you need them to account for the time it will take for them to dry.

20. Your front door is wide open most hours of the day. So are all of your windows. Advanced move: you live in a house where some doors and windows don’t have glass or screens or any way to *close* them.

21. You accept that seat numbers and bus tickets are not equivalent to the amount of people you can fit on the bus. You can always fit one more person on the bus.

22. You are that one more person trying to fit on the bus.

23. You have mastered the art of standing in the aisle of the bus. Advanced move: you have mastered sleeping while standing in the aisle of the bus.

24. When you go to a soda for a meal, you don’t ask for a menu; you ask what they have in their kitchen today.

25. You give – and follow – directions that include neither exact addresses nor street names, but instead involve descriptions of parks, colors of buildings, and that store over there.


This post is dedicated to anyone who has lived, worked, or played in rural Costa Rica. A special thanks to my Hojancha ohana – Charlotte, Anais, Jessica, Lara, Hanna, Maria, Bram, Guillaume, FX, Teniko, DJ, Marcus, and Scott – who have contributed (intentionally or otherwise!) to the creation of this list.
Originally posted -- http://sunnyamfitzgerald.com/2013/07/03/25-sure-signs-you-are-becoming-accustomed-to-life-in-rural-costa-rica-2/

We Moved In - Our First Weekend in Our New Home

Tracye at our friends house relaxing

We have finally gotten our keys to our house and our car and we are now officially living in our rental home here in Costa Rica.

We have enjoyed getting to know Costa Rica and her little nuances she has to offer.

Friday

We went to the feria (the local farmers market) and picked up some food and then got some essentials at Coopatenas, the local grocery store.

We took all that back to our friends house and then went and picked up the keys to our house and car. Talk about being excited.

We unloaded the cars and have suitcases all over the living room but we got our internet up and running. That should show you our priorities there... grin.

I have been working on some news to send out and I am having a dickens of a time with the Prophezine website. It just does not want to play right. So after a lot of frustration I give up. It is time to shut down and take a shower. What we do not know is that the water company is doing work on the pipes and they turn the water off around 7 - 8 PM at night.

No showers tonight Maynard.

You have got to be kidding. Both of us were looking forward to a nice shower.

Now, they did turn the water back on at 4:30 AM because I had to get up and turn off the running shower after it grumbled and growned then starting running.

Went back to bed and caught more zzzz's.

Saturday

I got up around 7:30 in the morning and started making coffee. Got the water boiled and poured it into my french press.

To my dismay, my french press was damaged in the last leg of the trip. OH NOO... No Coffee.

Thank goodness Tracye had the foresight to get a coffee sock. She likes making coffee in the sock vs the french press.

Whew... a bad day due to no coffee has been averted. Thank you Tracye.

We had a great cup of coffee and I cut up some fresh fruit that we bought at the feria for breakfast.

We sat here in our wonderful kitchen answering emails and listening to the new sounds. There are parrots outside making noise along with other birds. I go to put my bowl in the sink and that is when I notice we have a sugar ant invasion.

These are those microscopic ants that invade by the millions. We were able to catch the invasion at around a couple hundred thousand.

Yes they were all over and would not go away.

That is till I reverted back to my high school chem and biology classes.

See, ants are blind and they are acidic creatures. How they get around is by following the trails of acid laid by the scouts.

So how do you get rid of sugar ants?

You use "AXION... EL VERDADERO ARRANCAGRASA - or in English "The Real Grease Stripper." (Note - to get the full effect, this needs to be said in your best Spanish radio announcer voice and it helps if you speak into an empty metal garbage can... try it, it works.)

Folks, this is some of the best dish washing soap on the planet. What is great is that it even works in cold water. Which is what most kitchen sinks have here in Costa Rica, luke warm coldish water. Hot water is not very common in most kitchens except for US American homes who have installed a hot water heater.

See some of the main ingredients in this soap is magnesium and sodium. For those of you who took chemistry in school, you know these as "base metals" and react harshly to "acids."

Want to get rid of ants which are acidic in nature? Use something that kills the acid, which is AXION!

We have not had the ants return yet and it has been two days.

Saturday afternoon was pretty uneventful.

Well not quite.

We went for an early dinner at the worlds best pizza parlor, Ristorante Pizzeria Alida.

Folks, I am a huge pizza snob. I used to help manage a pizza parlor in the SF bay area that constantly won best pizza in all of the San Fransisco Bay Area. For those of you who may be wondering, the place was called Fargo's Pizza and it was located in Mountain View, CA.

Well, Alida's pizza is to die for. They make everything from scratch. Alida tosses the dough and gets it so paper thin that you can almost see through it.

She then lays down just a little of their sauce and then piles the ingredients on. My mouth is watering just thinking of it.

This is the best pizza I have had in a very long time. PROMISE - if you come down for a visit, we will take you to Alida's. You will love it too.

Sunday

We got the chance to go to church here in Atenas. Once a month they have an English / Spanish sermon and it was nice meeting a lot of the expats.

It was neat being in church here. Many of the songs we knew already, but were in Spanish. So you could sing along in English if you know all the words.

What is great is that you see the love of the Lord and you know that you are brothers and sisters in the Lord. Even though there are language barriers, the holy spirit is there and the body is one.

So we sat and we enjoyed our first church service here in Costa Rica and then later went out to Don YaYo's for some lunch.

Tracye had the taco plate and I had the typical blue plate special AKA Casado which means "married" in Spanish. This is a typical dish that every restaurant has. It usually has some sort of pork or chicken, with rice, beans, salad, fried plantains, a potato hash, and maybe another spoonful of something.

It is called Casado because the wives in the morning would fix a meal that would last their men during a hard days work. Every restaurant has their own spin on the meal and Don Yayo's is famous for their Chicharona's. Chicharona is fried pork belly with a little fat. The same area that bacon is made from, but with more meat. It was pretty good. Again, forgot to take pictures of the food. We need to do that so that folks can see what they are missing.

We then came home and have been hanging out on the interent. I was chatting with PZ Insider Kaye and her husband. They are the first PZ Folks to come down and visit us. Looks like they will be moving down as well.
It is now 4:40 Sunday afternoon.

Our first weekend in our new home has been a blessing. There is a lot we still have to learn, but we take the road bumps on at a time and even though they might be a hassle, it is nice knowing that we are where the Lord has led us. We are living a simple life. The moment we stepped off the plane and got in the van with our driver Alex, we felt what we have been calling the "foreboding feeling" just melt away.

Pura Vida! - To the good life.