Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

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.