Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

Another overdue post about what's been going on:

• Project Afro!
  After about 10 years of shaving my head I'm going to try going the other way & seeing how much hair I can grow before Ellie & I return to NYC in July. I'm not sure how far this will go as normally I get about 1/2 an inch of hair on my head & decide I can't stand it & must shave. I'm hoping to have Maxwell hair by the time I get back to NYC, we'll see...


• How Gimpy am I
  So I sprained my ankle (el tobillo, en español) back in October & it still hurts. I can't run yet & I yelp like a hurt puppy when my foot gets pointed down. Shouldn't it be healed by now? Maybe I broke it? Well I decided to get my questions answered & went to a Doctor. After $40, 2 X-rays, & 2 injections with a horse needle into my ankle I got my answers. No, I didn't break my ankle, but I apparently sprained it really BAD. It should eventually heal, but I shouldn't plan on running more than across the street for a while.
  Also: Did I mention how HUGE that needle was? & he stuck me twice! & each time he twisted it around like a spyrograph, ouch!


• I left my heart in Guatemala
  Not really, but I'd definitely go back again. Ellie & I had a great time. We visited Antigua, Lago Atitlan, Quetzaltenango (aka Xela), Flores & the Mayan ruins of Tikal. Antigua was beautiful, full of tourists, but still charming with cobblestone streets & spanish colonial buildings.
  We didn't care so much for the towns we visited surrounding Lago Atitlan. The scenery was beautiful, a lake in the shadow of 3 volcanoes with a few towns & houses on the hillsides, but visiting on Christmas Eve & Christmas Day meant that most things were closed. I could also see that the area hadn't completely recovered from last hurricane season.
  Xela was cold. It wasn't snowing or anything, but it was chillier than the rest of the places we visited in Guatemala. We're told that nearby mountains divert cold winds down into Xela, which explained why when we went up a mountain to a nearby hot spring it was warmer! Despite the cold I really liked Xela. We spoke a bit with the Mayan woman @ our hostel there, had a few good meals, & got to see how we thought the people in Guatemala "really" lived.
  We only spent 2 nights in Flores & both days we went to Tikal. The ruins were really impressive. There is a model in the park showing what it would look like minus the trees & earth that cover the city now, it's incredible. As it stands now the pyramids & some of the other large buildings have been uncovered, but it would be beautiful see the city restored. That still doesn't make what we saw any less great, it was a great way to start a year.
  Also: We had some great pancakes (I just wasn't expecting that. Who knew?), caught up on some videos in the movie cafes, & laughed hard when we saw a McDonald's offering McPollo Frito.


• Bad English
  I'm going to be sad to leave Costa Rica, I feel like I'm finally settling in here, we've figured out how to save a little bit on internet access (we bring our laptop to the university where Ellie teaches & use the wi-fi or use our neighbor's computer), I'm comfortable with my classes right now, & really enjoying teaching them, tonight I played a 'dry' version of "Have you ever?" (teaching the present perfect tense) & I taught what 'friends with benefits' were. I'm convinced that leaving soon is a good idea as things are only likely to go down from here.


• I can read!
  Okay, I don't read books. Or @ least I haven't for quite some time. I did most of the required reading in High School & some short stories in college, but since then not so much. Well living in a foreign country with no TV, a limited selection of movies, & since October no internet access @ home has given me a lot of time to recall that reading is FUNdamental.
  First I read The DaVinci Code in about a week. I didn't love it (I thought the history in the book was more interesting than the story in the book), but I've decided to try reading some more anyway. If nothing else I'm finding that it's helping improve the speed that I read all the tech news I try to read daily. Since we've been away I've finished Snow Crash, Kitchen Confidential (I so want to watch his show on the Food Network!), a year's worth of MIT Technology Review back issues & I'm trying to finish The General in His Labrynth before I leave Costa Rica. Any suggestions for when I'm done?

OK, that's about it for now. I'm really behind in updating this thing, partially because my Mother & Sister came down on January 21st. My Sister was only here for a week & my Mom is staying until February 17th. One of my big reasons for writing is to let my family know that I'm OK, it seems somewhat redundant when I see my Mom every couple days & she can see that I'm OK. I will write in a bit about what we all did & the other things my Mom is doing with her time down here, but that's for later.

Kepfram

So you wanna know where we've been living?

As many of you know we moved out of our last apartment in San Pedro back in October because it felt like we were living in a dorm. We really wanted a grown up apartment, and hopefully one where we might have some Tico neighbors who we could get to know and talk with in Spanish. Kepfram talked to some really nice people we had met back in August who ran a restaurant near the center of town. Turned out they also managed the apartments in the same building - a building we'd admired from the first time we'd seen it because it was one of the few really nice OLD buildings we'd come across in this very young looking and sometimes ugly city (which seems to have had most of it's development in the 1970s).
We fell in love with the apartment because of the hardwood floors, the old fashioned fixtures and tiles, the windows, the light, and the SPACE it offered us.
The rent is only a little less than our San Pedro apt ($310/month including utilities versus the $375/month we were paying), but it does not have internet (actually our downstairs neighbor lets us use his internet, and if we'd been here longer we would have invested in the equipment needed to share the connection with him our set up our own). However, because I can wash our cloths and hang them out to dry on the patio, we're no longer spending $50 per month on laundry (if we'd been staying longer we also would have invested in a washing machine). But the price was not really the selling point (there are much cheaper places here, they just aren't very nice!), it's the location and the people, and the fact that we could NEVER afford an apartment this nice in NYC so we just couldn't resist!
Because we're on the 3rd floor the views are great - if we want to get up at the crack of dawn we can even watch the sun rise. There's more closet space than I've had in years, and I love that there's a bathtub (even if it's too small to really relax in).
Our landladies provided us with a really lovely table and chairs and a functional couch and dresser. We bought the bed, range, fridge, and ironing board from the last tenent, along with all his kitchen stuff and household linens which we've of course supplemented a little to keep Kepfram happy in the kitchen (and we'd gladly sell all of it for $300).
If we weren't itching to get on with our traveling adventure in March and back home to NYC in July we'd be really happy to stay here.