Finally...photos

Since we're getting some errands done in Cobano, I have time to upload photos. This is Khal and Asan's house. Our "wing" is on the left, theirs is on the right, and the living area is in the middle.



Here's the view from my yoga mat (in the living room) at 5:30am:



This is the lightening-fast section of their driveway:



Here are the kids at the dining room table:



Jules surveys the ocean on his first day there. This scene would be impossible to capture now, since he takes off toward the water faster than we can strip the clothes off of him.



Here's my favorite, of Fiona and Liam in their school uniforms on the second day of school:

Sharon: One with the Land

So it’s impossible to ignore here that you are merely another animal on this great, green earth. First of all, the land here is huge and awe-inspiring, and humbling. The lines between inside and out are blurred; our rooms don’t have screens, the living and dining rooms don’t have walls, all manner of insects, geckos, spiders, even bats fly in and out. The noises of nature—cicadas, the waterfall, howler monkeys, the rain--can easily drown out conversation.

So it’s not just a little disconcerting to look out the shower window to see my non-biodegradable, neon-blue shampoo pouring out onto the jungle floor. I know how it happens: there are so few people in such a huge space, that nature will win, at least in the big picture. But for how long? Costa Ricans have never had to care where their waste water goes, but when does the balance tip? I notice that there is a little dead river of mud where our shower drains, and I wish I could run to Whole Foods and buy environmentally respectful bath products. But everything for sale here is as toxic as possible, it seems, because it’s easy to think that you can’t make a mark on a landscape so huge and powerful.

Another fact of life that is completely distressing is the garbage situation. I challenge even the most hardened of you to take your next empty wine bottle and just throw it in the garbage. Imagine throwing every waste product generated by a family of 8 into the garbage: every bottle, can, and plastic tub. And on top of that, every cookie, cracker, anything you buy in a package comes in teeny, single servings wrapped in plastic. There is no recycling, there isn't even a garbage dump. Our garbage gets collected in town, and taken "to the other side of the hill" where it is all burned, every toxic piece of it. Very scary.

Sharon: Montezuma's Revenge

That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? One second you’re happily lounging in a beach-side café, mulling your good fortune while a very nice local woman minds your child back at home, and the next second you’re racing toward the door marked “Womens use mens.”

Jules and I don’t feel so good today. It’s no big deal, more weakness than anything. I know it’ll be over soon, and I’m glad we have almost four weeks left. But I sure am grateful that we had Lady to watch Jules this morning, and that Max took the kids to the beach this afternoon.

This is such an amazing place, and Khalida and Asan are such amazing hosts. They must get so tired of their constant stream of houseguests, but you’d never know it. We feel so at home here, so welcomed and comfortable.

It’s a very large space, and that helps. There are two buildings, sharing a common open-air living area, making a giant U-shape (if I can ever find high-speed wireless, I’ll upload photos for y’all to see). Khal and Asan’s rooms are on one side, and ours are on the other, with the living and dining areas at the middle. For me, it’s an awesome experiment in communal living, the kind of co-housing arrangement that lots of us in Austin fantasize about. And, boy, does it work. Four adults watching four kids is SO much easier that two adults watching two kids, especially when the kids are the same age and play together.

[A little aside: Liam PLAYS with Fiona. It’s insane. You’d never believe it’s the same kid. Fiona is widely regarded as bossy and headstrong, but Liam seems to love her (yes, Freud, go to town). She pesters and pesters until he can’t say no anymore. It’s absolutely delightful to watch, him cornered, Fiona animatedly directing him in some game, or him running around the house in his own world (pretending to be a planet, or singing a song) while Fiona follows behind, playing “with” him without him even knowing.]

Anyway, being here makes me think a lot more seriously about the communal living thing. It’s really as great as you might imagine. We carpool the kids to school. We play with them in pairs, while one person folds laundry or makes dinner. Every meal is so much more festive. The dads can chat over beers while casually watching the kids play. There are kinks to work out, sure but overall, it sure feels good to share family life with such good friends.

Oh yeah…Kristen asked if we have water and electricity, and the answer is yes…and sometimes together! It’s nearly impossible to believe that water pipes come all the way out here, but they do. The electrical cables are just strung through the trees. It’s amazing. As for them being together, it’s the notorious Costa Rican system (and maybe lots of place have it, I don’t know) of heating shower water through electrical boxes. Don’t tell those hair-dryer label people.

Sharon: Food

Here’s a double-post for my pals on Goodreads. I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and there’s no better place to be reading it than here in a rural part of a developing country. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s her family's account of a year of living off of only local food (they had to know the person who grew or raised it). So far it seems to be about half about their reasons for doing it (the politics, economics, science of it), and half about the methods (how asparagus grows, how they set up their garden). For food fanatics like me, it’s awesome.

It takes on a new significance here. The town and its economies have changed a lot since I first came here, and there are lots of imported items available. But still, people are much more connected to the land and what it offers us. Asan (and now Khalida) are a wealth of information about the plants around us. We take walks down the driveway and scavenge nibbles from the side of the road. There’s a tree (pochote) with large, shiny, dark-green leaves you can eat. It’s got a nice tang to it, and eating it makes me feel better for the complete absence of anything else green in my diet here. Jules loves it. There are a handful of trees on the driveway with berries and seeds we can eat: nances, lenguas de vaca (you should see the leaves), and others. Asan came in yesterday with a fresh coconut, two spoons, and two straws for my kids to drink the milk and scrape out the yummy insides.

I LOVE that the kids are really learning where food comes from. Our eggs come from Asan’s mother’s house, and the kids search for the loot in the garage where the chickens have taken up nesting. Starting today, we’re going to get our milk fresh from Asan’s grandmother’s cows. The honey came from a hive on the property.

On the other hand, I’m learning things that make me see how easy it is for us to lose our food culture, for it to be perverted into the kind of food-comes-from-the-supermarket mentality that we have in the States. A little local geography: The center of Montezuma is at the beach. Khal's house is about a mile inland toward Cobano, the nearest town with facilities like a bank, schools, clinic, etc. Cobano is only 7 km from the ocean, but never, in the entire time I lived here, did I see someone eating fish. I talked to Asan about this yesterday, and he told me that the fish he used to serve in his Cobano restaurant came from Puntarenas, about 4 hours—including a ferry ride!—away! He also bets that it was caught down the road from Montezuma, and shipped to Puntarenas for distribution. There is no fish market in this entire region, despite the fact that we live less than 1 km from the ocean. If we want to eat fish, we have to ask Ana, Khal’s housekeeper who lives among fishermen down the road from Montezuma, to bring us the catch of the day. The other day she brought us a whole red snapper (which Max gallantly descaled, by the way) that had been caught the day before. It easily fed five adults the most delicious fish I have ever tasted, and cost us $4.50 total. But there is no easy way to make it a part of our diet, and the Ticos who don't live or have relatives living specifically ON the beach, have virtually no way to acquire it regularly.

I also learned that the avocados, which are a staple of the diet here, now come from Mexico. Fifteen years ago, Marcos and Emilia used to keep a potato sack full of avocados in the kitchen. They collected them from the tree in Marcos’s mother’s yard. But apparently in the intervening years, an invading, non-local termite snuck in—the local theory is that they came in on the bales of imported telephone wire, but it’s easy to see why locals would blame technology—and ate all of the avocado trees. In fifteen years, they went from having an avocado per person per day for free, to having to import them and pay American prices for them. Such an awesome source of good fats and nutrients…and now the non-wealthy can’t afford them. So sad.

Don't want to end on such a depressing note...Ummm... I am learning to make some Tico foods (gallo pinto, tortillas from scratch) and will be able to take that skill with me back to Texas. Oh, and I'll never be satisfied with HEB-brand dried black beans again. There's got to be a better source in the US of A. The beans they eat here have such full, rich flavor all by themselves, nothing added. It's a good thing, too, since we eat them three times a day, and sometimes for an afternoon snack!

Sharon: Futbol

On Liam’s second day of school (which he LOVES, by the way), they took all the kids in a bus to see a soccer game a few miles away. He came home that afternoon full of enthusiasm:

“Mommy, I want to pretend soccer.”
“Okay,” I said.
He clarified: “But first, we have to make a party.”

How’s that for cultural assimilation?

Sharon: The Bank

So we arrive at the bank in Cobano at 8:30, full of dread, but in desperate need of some cash. We take a number: 16. They’re “Now Serving” number 86. Max watches for an hour, and they’ve only gotten to 97, so we decide to wander around town and stop into the internet café. We check back in at the bank an hour and a half later, and they’re only on 3. That’s seventeen people in two and a half hours, and we have thirteen more people to go before our number is called. We decide to go home for lunch, and come back in an hour, expecting to have to wait about an hour after that.

Of course, you can see where this is headed: we get back to the bank to find them “Now Serving” number 42. And the next ticket? TWENTY-NINE. That would be eighty-seven people in line ahead of us.

I wonder about the lane marked something like “Servicio Rapido.” Max had told me that meant you stood in line for two hours instead of sitting down for four. I ask the security guard for his take, and he says it depends on what number you have for regular service. I roll my eyes, and show him my #29 ticket, and he gives me a sympathetic eye roll.

At this point, I enter into a world that is very familiar. Yes, there’s something about it that I picked up when I lived here, but there’s also something very Texan about it that I’d never thought much about until today. There’s this sense that light-hearted chatting with a perfect stranger over misfortune can bring us together. It’s a kind of small talk that generally annoys Northerners, or makes them pretty uncomfortable…unless it’s about severe weather, right? That’s the only thing I can think of that Northerners just chat with strangers about. Anyway, feeling very southern and certainly very Tica after this brush with bureaucratic inefficiency, I launch into my story about our wait in the morning, and the security guard gives me a “boy-I-can’t-believe-it” shake of the head as I take my chances in the express lane.

I stand there for just a couple of minutes, when my security guard pal sidles up to me, and hands me a ticket that says “47.” Max and I later hypothesize that people got fed up at lunch, or as the afternoon was wearing on, and just threw their tickets on to the floor. I make a mental note to check the litter on the sidewalk outside the bank the next time I go in. Anyway, how he got it, I’ll never know, but dang, he must have saved us hours and hours of waiting.

Sharon: Number 16

That's what we are in line at the bank right now, and they're on 94. In the past hour they've done 8 people, so now we're down the street, waiting in the Internet cafe.

I put all of our money eggs in one basket, knowing that ATM's have spread around the world, figuring that if there are three or four places around Montezuma with Internet access, that an ATM was a sure thing. Well, the ATM apparently is working, but it's not accepting PLUS cards (despite the big PLUS logo on it). So we're cashless, dependent on the bank where we can get cash using our credit cards.

Otherwise, all is well! Leave comments, people, so I know you're out there!