Three Months

June 10 will mark three months in Costa Rica.  I can't say this has become my new normal yet, but we have started to settle in. My thoughts go both to the good and not so good about the country. Maybe not so good is not the best way to put things.  Other words come to mind such as different or inconvenient.  It seems that both have both positive and negative aspects. Why don't I just make a list.  I like a good list.

• Familia: It's really nice to be around Eduardo's family and for him to have access to them.  It's been years since he has been able to be involved on this level.  I know he is enjoying the time he is spending with them.  They have also been an endless help for us during this transition time.  Without them we wouldn't have known how to go about getting our cell phones, how to get around on the buses when we need to, who to talk to regarding lawyers to get property moved over to our name.....  It's been great going to family gatherings and spending time. Honestly, it's been one of the best parts of us moving here.
  
  We have had a chance to spend time with his sister Sandra and his mom who is living with Sandra and her family.  It's been nice to see my mother-in-law on a regular basis.  She is such a sweet woman and I'm lucky to have someone like her in my life.  We have been invited over to Eduardo's sister Martiza's house and spend time with her daughter and two boys.  One of Eduardo's aunts live just one street away with some of the cousins we see them often since they are so close.
  
  We haven't been able to have a big family gathering yet because of the virus and people are being careful still.  I'm looking forward to all of his loud aunts being around him for the first time in years.
  
  As wonderful as his family has been, it's also been hard on me.  His family is my family now and I feel very welcome by them.  I was accepted as part of his family and treated just like one of them.  The difficult part is I get lonely there sometimes.  I don't know what is being said or going on most of the time.  I can pick up parts of the conversation but not a lot of it.  Eduardo is good to tell me things that are going on, but he is also involved in the conversation and if it doesn't involve me then it usually isn't interpreted. No fault to Eduardo on that, he just gets involved.  It can feel like I am just looking in on the family gathering and not part of them.
  
  I miss my family.  I really miss going shopping with my mom on Mondays and having my brother live with us.  Our relationship had gotten so strong over the last year he lived with us that I miss his friendship and smart mouth.  No one here tells me to shut up like he does.  I missed mothers day with my mom and her birthday is coming up soon that I will also miss.  I knew missing them was going to be part of this whole process and I accepted that moving here. I am looking forward to seeing them when the time comes for that.  I'm crying sitting here talking about it.  Man, I miss my mom and would give anything for one of her hugs. Ok, pulling myself together and moving on.
  
  

• Shopping: I love the Central Market and the fresh farmers markets.  It's so nice being able to go get fresh fish and vegetables that you knew were grown in the same country.  The taste of the food is so much better too.  Strange, I know.  Chicken tastes so much richer because it wasn't raised in a giant chicken farm and previously frozen.  Tropical fruits taste so much better when you actually get them fresh directly from the tropical country.  I didn't know bananas were so good until I got here.
  
  Finding traditional things I'm used to can be hard.  There is the Central Market that I go to for the meat and veggies.  Then there is Pali for the basic items like butter, rice (so much rice) sugar, and so on.  Then there is Mas X Menos that I go for the things that I can't find at the Central Market or Pali such as brown sugar, regular ketchup, and basil. Then Auto Mercado for the thing I can't find at the other three places like Italian sausage, tarter sauce, and free AC with browsing.  I would kill for some lemons.  Can't a woman just make some nice chicken picatta and some lemon blueberry scones! I haven't tried to make the chicken with limes yet but I may get desperate and give it a go soon.  I've changed how I cook many things simply because the items I have to cook with aren't always the same.
  
  

• Travel: So travel is different in many different ways.  The most obvious one is that we walk so much more to go to the store(s) then we did back in the U.S.  I've lost like 30 pounds because we walk so much here compared to home.  We had a local Kroger that was like a quarter mile away from home back in the U.S.  I can say that I NEVER walked there to go pick up things.  Here I walk to the store all the time, usually more than once a week. On the other side, there are days I would love to just get in the car and go get butter instead of having to walk a mile.  Usually it's not a problem, but a girls got to have lazy days.
  
  Driving in Heredia is a challenge.  No, that doesn't really add true meaning to the experience.  Driving in Heredia is like you are living Grand Theft Auto without so much killing. You take a mild person from Costa Rica who is nice and helpful and wouldn't hurt a lightning bug and put them behind the wheel of a car and you get an angry toddler on a sugar rush with a filthy diaper who isn't afraid to toss it at you.  There are not many lights, a lot of stops that people often see as mild suggestions, bikes and scooters that go wherever they can fit, and usually a husband in the passenger seat who is acting like a cat does when you take it for a drive without a carrier.  It's fun. Please come down here and experience it for yourself.  Please, also take my husband too so I can just drive to the darn store and get butter without telling him.
  
  Travel outside of the city isn't bad. We've gone a number of places outside of the city from the right coast to the left coast.  Most of the roads are two lane roads and in good condition.  Traveling here like taking a scenic road trip.  It goes a bit slower because the roads aren't straight and have some fun curves.  The only real negative part are the trucks.  Getting behind a fully loaded truck on an uphill climb can be challenging since 90% of the country is uphill.
  
  
  
• Language: I don't understand what anyone is saying!
  
  
  
• Neighborhoods: There are two different perspectives coming from my view of a neighborhood.  There is the one I am currently living in and the one that I will be living in once we move to Potrero.
  
• Home - I come from the basic suburbia style neighborhood back home.  We were living in a house with at least 30 feet between our home and the home next door.  We were pretty much left to ourselves by those round us.  We had a yard and garage and it was pretty standard as far as life goes in the U.S.
  
• Heredia - I live in a birdcage, directly next to two other birdcages, with birdcages across the street from us. Keep in mind that I not used to living in a urban area so being so close to others is a bit of a strange thing.  Even when I lived in apartments, it was still different. It's not bad being that close to others, it's just different.  There is the woman next to us to our right who keeps giving us different Costa Rician food - we like her. There is the duplex on the other side where one guy thinks it's time to start projects at 7:30 in the evening - I'm just saying if you are going to be nailing anything at night it shouldn't be your wall.  Everyone has a dog and all those dogs are a feather triggers for barking.  The nice part of that is if I want to pet a dog there is a 100% chance there is one outside within 5 feet. It's nice to have everything so close to us and most of our neighbors are very nice.
  
• Potrero - While we are not living there yet, we have spent some time in the area close to the property to get things done and working with the local government and such.  It's so quite there at night.  You can hear the ocean in the distance.  It's also a slightly larger birdcage.  You have your property that is walled in and it's nice to have that privacy from others.  Most people we have come in contact with seem nice.  There is a lot of expats in the area so it is more likely that I can actually say hello and not hola.
  
  
  
• Eduardo: I know it seems strange that my husband is a topic, but here we are.  I love my husband and I also actually like him too.  Our relationship has been great since we've moved here without any real arguments.  He has been the one who listens to me, who holds me when I am feeling lonely and need to cry, the one who cuddles up with me at night.  He is my navigator in the car, and the one I go on road trips with.  We work out well with house chores and compliment each other well here.  He really has been my everything here and I have come to depend on him more than I ever did in the U.S. So, with all that said, will someone please take him on a short trip away from me for 24 hours!!
  
  
  
• Flora and Fauna:  Costa Rica is beautiful.  That about neatly sums it up.  It's country of beautiful hills and mountains.  There are lovely flowering plants all over the place with palm trees.  There isn't a flat line of sight to be had.  From the beaches to the mountains, I have not found a natural spot of the country that wasn't breathtaking.
  
  For a country that is so small, there are massively different ecosystems.  You have the area in Guanacaste that is dry and hot that you can travel two hours away from and find rain forest that clouds hang in most of the year. The Pacific side of the county has a different rainy season than the Caribbean side of the country.
  
  Since we have been spending time in Guanacasta because we are building there, we have also been visiting many of the beaches - such a hard life I live.  

• Weather:  Unlike back home, Cost Rica has two seasons.  The wet season and the dry season.  They call them the green season and the dry season.  The green season has two different parts to it.  We arrived at the end of the dry season.  It didn't rain during the first month we were here at all.  After that, here in the central valley, it entered a period of transition.  We would have rain every few days or once a week. The initial part of the green season is what we are currently in.  It's the milder part of the season.  Usually every day it rains starting sometime in the afternoon and rains on and off for a few hours or the rest of the evening.  The second part of the rainy seasons comes later in the year around September to November. It rains then too but it's more often and more days where it rains all day long. 
  
  It's dryer in Guanacaste, where we will be building.  They still have the rainy and dry seasons but the dry season lasts longer.  They have just started into the transition period there when they get some rain here and there.  The rain there doesn't usually last for hours during the first part of the green season.  The first rainfall there since the previous rainy season happened just about two weeks ago.  Unlike the central valley, Guanacaste doesn't have occasional rain storms during the dry season.  It's just dry.  Everything green turns brown and the hills and mountains look dead.  Previously, I have only been in the country at the end of the green season where it was lush and green.  It was different to see it so barren in Guanacasta when we first started to go up.  It does take a number of months until it gets so dry after the rain stops.  When the rain starts there, it's a night and day difference.  One week it's so dry that they have fires that spring up in the brush and the next visit there two weeks later and it's a totally different country with green trees and hills as far as the eye can see.  I can't wait to see how much more it blooms as time goes on. 
  
  I am currently damp.  I am not a huge fan of damp.  I go from being perfect at the start of my day to being warm around 10, to being hot around 12, to being happy by the start of rain around 1, to being chilly and damp around 4, to being cold, damp, but freshly showered around 9, to thanking God that my bedroom window doesn't allow a lot of airflow so my bedding isn't damp around 11.  On the upside, I no longer have dry skin.  

• Goverment:  So Costa Rica is a democratic socialist country.  The basic simple explanation between a republic like we have in the USA and a democratic socialist government is in the size and involvement of the government and taxes.  Since this is my blog, I get to say what I want about government either way and no one can stop me :P 
  
  I'm more liberal in my political leanings and I do like many of the socialist ideas that work here in Costa Rica for the benefit of the people.  I am not a huge supporter of a capitalist society because to me it feels cold and not really beneficial to the people.  However, I will admit that neither of the systems work perfectly and a blending of them together is a balance I  really get behind. 
  
  One of the benefits of a social-democratic country means that people are cared for.  That means there is government housing, health care, banking, and need assistance.  I respect a number of the systems in place here in Costa Rica.  An example of this is how the elderly are treated.  The government is involved in the care and maintenance of the elderly.  They do not allow them to starve, to go without health care, to go homeless, or for family to abuse or neglect them.  The closest thing I can compare it to in the USA is child protective services. 
  
  One of the negative things about a social-democratic country is the size of the government and the red tape. Nothing is simple when it comes to getting anything done here.  You can't just file paperwork and send it into the government and have it stamped and taken care of.  So much here needs to be done in person, and redone in person because you forgot to put a period in the right place, and redone in person because the period is fine but the person you talked to previously wasn't right and the information is different, and redone in person because you had to have that paperwork submitted in two weeks and while you did submit it in two weeks it took that long to get the right information from you on the placement of the period and why the wrong information was given to you in the first place, and redone because you forgot to give them a DNA sample from your housekeepers second sons first grade teacher - that they never told you that they needed. What they need may also change by the time of day it is asked and the person who is in charge at the time of asking.  *SIGH

That is a general sum of my thoughts so far as my life here goes.  All together, I am happy we made this move and it's been an awesome adventure.  Some days are sad missing my family and the way my life once was, but those days are not frequently.  Some days its boring adjusting to the slower pace here in the country.  Some days its perfect with trips to the central market, naps in the afternoon, and making dinner.  

We are slowly working on getting what we need together for the property to start the building process.  Everything here takes its own time - see Government section.  I am hoping we can get all the paperwork we need submitted to the engineers and have permits processing and steps taken in the next two months to be able to pour a foundation and start the real process of building.  Eduardo has been out cutting trees down on our land and taking care of the things we can.  We have spoken to contractors about clearing the land and starting the grading process.  I hope we are about a month away from getting some real steam built up and having selected contractors, engineers, and be able to show something of progress - something...........