Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

So nearly everyone I've met down here, visitor & local has warned me about safety & shared stories about they or someone they know or heard about got robbed & no one feels safe on the streets of San José @ night. Because of all these warnings I act like a spy whenever I leave the house, always watching my back, I vary my routine, & walk hard & fast wherever I'm going. Now after 2 months of this I'm of the opinion that whatever petty crime there is here is what's one the news and in the papers & that's what people worry about & not the sordid political issues of the country. Not that I can claim to understand much of anything after 2 months, but anyway...

Since I haven't dropped an update in a little bit so here goes...

• Job Update: My work search is over, @ least for the moment. After 2 days of training I had my first class, the next week I had another, & next week I'll have another one for a total of 10 hours of work. & being lazy like I am I'm happy with it as it's enough to keep me well fed & put enough change in my pocket to go out a little during the week & maybe a weekend trip now & again. Also, I'm enjoying teaching. I do need to work on my technical knowledge of English so I can better explain "why" something is right to my students.


• Buyer's Remorse: I bought an old laptop and a cheap digital camera for this trip & I'm not completely happy with either. With the camera, I got what I paid for so I'm not surprised & I may buy a new one in a little bit, but I've recently had some computer issues & I'm afraid to order parts or something new because import duties are applied erratically, like most law enforcement here (maybe I'd pay an extra $200, maybe I wouldn't, I'd rather not find out). I may just have to learn to live with it, we'll see...


• Spanish: Living in a building full of foreigners Ellie & I haven't been practicing much of our Spanish. Working as English-teachers doesn't help either. We get a fair bit of practice when we go out as we have a "No English" rule for when we leave the house (I'm hoping that also makes us look a bit less like tourists/targets). Now that I've got a full schedule too we'll be looking for Spanish conversation clubs & other activities to help us practice our Spanish. I'm hoping that between a stack of language CDs, free classes @ my job on Fridays, & practice with some friends of ours maybe we'll make some progress.


• Weather: My fond impression of the rainy season was the wrong impression. We got here @ the beginning of "winter" aka the rainy season when there were gentle afternoon showers lasting about an hour or 2 @ most. Last week we got a taste of things to come, 4 hour+ down pours that can start & stop anytime after 10am. My shoes are still damp from Friday's rain. I bought a poncho today to help me in the future, now I just need to find some galoshes or maybe a kayak...

No sushi in the VIP.
In retrospect this seems kinda obvious, but I felt obligated to try it @ least once. The sushi @ the movie theater wasn't very good (gasp in surprise). So our movie night was doubly disappointing, neither Charlie & the Chocolate Factory nor our sushi were what we were hoping for. On the positive side, the crepes that they serve in the movie theater were very nice, so it wasn't a total loss.

Anyway, as Ellie said I've got a job this week, but it's part-time & @ this point I don't know how many classes/hours I'll be teaching after I'm through with orientation/training so I'm going to continue my job search to be on the safe side.
I'm still struck by the economics of Costa Rica. After shopping @ Pequeño Mundo yesterday I bought some designer black dress shoes for under $20, but there are few laundrymats here & it costs about $4 per load to have laundry done. Whatever. I've decided that once I have a disposible income I will become a clothes whore & I will return to Costa Rica annually from now on to go shopping & feed crocodilles.

FYI: I've updated this blog so you can all post replies to anything we post here if you like (although someone seems to have figured this out already).
Since I keep talking about how things are I thought I should include some pictures, here are some street scenes from our neighborhood & San José. Note the wrought iron "trash can" in the foreground of the first picture. I'm told Costa Rica has about 4 million people & around 8 million dogs (this country is in desperate need of Bob Barker's help), since most of the dogs here are small people put household trash in those things on trash day instead of trash cans, not that it's incredibly interesting, but it took me a week to figure out what those things were...















Some other things I've learned & seen last week:
Cornmeal doesn't exist here. Which confuses me to no end as finding things made with wheat flour is a challenge. You can buy as much corn flour & corn tortillas as you want, but when I wanted to make pollenta & I had to buy an imported box of "quick cooking pollenta." Ingredients: cornmeal.
Maybe I'm just shopping in the wrong place.
FYI: Corn flour pancakes made with sour milk & sour cream are delicious. You can thank Ellie for that discovery.

These geckos provided us no end of entertainment at our last trip to the warmer low lying country (we don't have them up here where the high temperature is only 80 degrees). The weather's been great overall, not perfect mind you, as the rainy season has definately started - it rains every day now starting at about noon & sometimes continuing into the night.

The lastest news: Kepfram got a job! He'll be working at an English institute which organizes company classes. He'll be going around the city to the companies to give his classes on site - something he feels safer doing in the evenings than I would (in fact, since he won't be around to "pick me up" from work and walk me home in evenings anymore since he'll be working, I'm going to have to start taking cabs home after my classes...).

Kepfram'll need to wear a tie to work now, we went shopping yesterday at "pequeño mundo" where you can buy deeply discounted cloths & housewears that you have to dig out of moldy smelling cardboard boxes. Kepfram was able to buy 4 dress shirts & 5 ties for $10. Not bad.

I'm glad he'll be working - everything seems to be falling into place as far as our game plan is concerned. I think I've even convinced him to study Spanish again ;).

Okay, so I'm not sitting on the beach right now.... I just got back from work & Kepfram is cooking dinner. I like the new job. I have the opportunity to meet and talk to Ticos (what Costa Ricans call themselves), they (the students) want to learn (English is vital to their future employablity), the school I'm working for provides a lot of resources and support, and we laugh a lot.
I'm teaching 2 classes right now: an intermediate conversation class and an advanced "integrated skills" class (vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, reading, writing, speaking). Each meets 2 nights a week. I've been putting a lot of hours into planning lessons, but I'm starting to get the hang of it, & maybe I'll be able to take some time to be a tourist again in a few weeks. But for now it's what's on my mind when I go to sleep, and what I'm thinking about when I wake up.
I haven't had as much time recently to practice Spanish, but today was a good day:

Fui con Kepfram y una amiga de nuestro edeficio al centro de San José para ir al Museo del Jade. Cuando estamos afuera de la casa siempre hablamos español. Por eso no sommos como touristas (gringos), y tambien es buena practica.
El Museo del Jade es en el 11 piso de un edeficio de gobierno en el centro (con una vista bonita sobre toda la ciudad y con las montañas en la distancia), toda la arte en el museo es de gente indígena - y la arte no es solo de jade, tambien es hecha de piedra de lava y de arcilla. Ahora yo sé mucho mas de la historia de éste país.
Después de visitar el museo, fuimos a una soda (pequeña restaurante) para sentarnos, comer bocados, y tomar té (y que lastima que en éste momento no estoy bebiendo café - en éste país con café tan bueno).
Fue la primara vez en Costa Rica que me sentí que los ticos quisieron ser como nuestros amigos [o es "querían ser" - ¡ay! es una forma del subjunctivo ¿no? - pero no sé].
Las dueñas habláron con nosotros sobre sus familias y tambien nos dijeron que tengamos que hablar en español diariamente y que debamos regresar para almorsarnos o desauynarnos un otro día. ("¡Abrimos a las seis y media de la mañana!") Y cuando su amigo llegó, le dijeron que estabamos practicando español y el se sentó a nuestra mesa y habló con nosotros tambien.
Fue una tarde muy amable.

Tonight I went to the movies.
Ellie was busy preparing lesson plans for the week so I took advantage of my being unemployed & went out.
After initally taking the bus in the wrong direction I missed my stop once I was going in the right direction & was treated to a lovely 1/2 mile hike along the highway complete with a lesson on "how to cross a divided highway in Costa Rica."
ah, good times...

Anyway, international release dates being what they are I choose to see Sahara as everything else was "old" to me, something I'd seen or something I thought Ellie would like to see with me. It was entertaining, but that's not important. I saw it in the VIP theater.
In the VIP there is stadium seating, recliners, waiters, & food. Shamefully I was late getting to the movie so I didn't have a chance to look over the food choices, but I'm told there's sushi so I'll be sure to check it out next time.
VIP movies cost more than twice what a normal movies costs here, but since a normal movie costs 1300 colones (<$3) & all movies are 1/2 price on Wednesday I expect Ellie & I will be out of the house every Wednesday for a while.

"Goodbye?!" We're living in Bizzaro world.
This morning (6am, damn!) Chelsea our landlady took Ellie & I to the organic market. I discovered a couple of interesting things @ the market & on the drive there:
1. To get a driver's license in Costa Rica you only need to prove your identity, pay $30, take a vision test, & have your blood pressure checked. There are no learner's permits, road tests, or even pamphlets telling you useful things like "don't hit anybody" or "don't drink & drive." This explains why people drive as they do & that explains the need for the blood pressure exam.
Note: if you ever visit here, pedestrians do not have the right of way @ any time, so feel free to hit as many as you wish.
2. Organic foods are dramatically cheaper than anything found in the supermarkets here. We bought a week's worth of food & it cost @ least a 1/3 less than our initial visit to the supermarket for a few items so we could get by till the weekend.
3. It is almost as cheap to eat @ a "soda" (local food spot where most meals cost $2 w/a beverage) as it is to buy groceries & cook.
4. Products made with recycled paper are cheaper than new ones. Which is the way I thought it should have been all along as they've already processed the raw materials, but that has more to do with US economics than anything else.
"Hello!"

This is not the view from our apartment. It's the view from the courtyard of our complex. I'm really digging the neighborhood, there's a bunch of stuff nearby that has me totally sold on the neighborhood: 24 food spots, 2 supermarkets, multiple movie theaters (I'm also told there's a theater nearby that has lay-z-boys for seats & serves sushi, I must find this place!), it's within walking distance of Ellie's job & there is a spot a couple blocks away that served us some of the best pizza we've ever had. Who would have expected we'd have to go to Costa Rica for awesome pizza?

This is a Costa Rican shower head. Recently I discovered they're also called "suicide showers" & I got a taste of why. So most buildings here don't have central water heaters, instead you have shower heads with an ELECTRIC heating element in them. I thought since everybody uses them that they'd obviously be designed safe in some fashion since I thought electricity & water didn't mix. I was wrong. I was in the shower last weekend trying to get the sand off from the beach (water pressue here is uniformly low, & by the way: I really like the beaches on the Pacific ocean, the sand is all powdery, not like on the Atlantic/Caribean coast where the sand is..., like sand) and I tried to hang my bathing suit from the pipe leading to the shower head. As I did this my hands touch the wires leading to the shower head. I felt a bit of a tingle. I thought to myself "Self, what was that?" & then I touched it again to confirm that I was being shocked by the shower wiring. Not my finest moment, but live & learn (hopefully).