Monday, January 5, 2009

Estamos aqui

Day three in costa rica begins to the tune of about 88 degrees fahrenheit in our bedroom. at 8 am. this is pretty similar to day two, and since day one only really began at 5 pm when the airport officials had finally (after an hour and a half of battling and towing the plane around the tarmac) discouraged the bees surrounding our plane and consented to let us off we don't have an 8 am data point. It's amazing here - not amazing good , not amazing bad. Full of potential, but full of difficulties. Ask us what we think two years from now.

The town that we live in, vientesiete de abril, is a tiny village of mostly dirt roads, one church, two 'super-markets', an elementary school and a soccer field smack in the middle. There is also a pub that hopefully may allow us to open up the lines of communication with the locals over a cerveza or two. Yesterday, we went for a walk through town and within a mile found ourselves on the other side, headed out in to the fields surrounding town.

The first few days have been a vacillation between exciting and quiet, including, but not limited to: being stopped by the costa rican police at a checkpoint only to find the registration on the car we have here expired two years ago (it was only as a result of our stumbling spanish and stupid smiles that we got off without a fine); removing the current residents of the house (countless giant jumping spiders, two dead frogs, and one scorpion) less the lizards, who we have decided to keep on hand on account of their voracious apetite; meeting most of the residents of the town in an effort to find out who had our key; trying to figure out why none of the outlets in the kitchen work, trying to get the water to work again after trying to figure out why none of the outlets in the kitchen work; realization of the true meaning of manana (for the first of many times); holding 6 hours of self taught spanish lessons; watching 2 hours of the first season of 'how I met your mother'; reading 450 some-odd cumulative pages of fiction, and celebrating one three month anniversary.

The house is incredible, even if slightly buggy. We can understand why there may have been a little disagreement as to whether or not it was too nice to be a model habitat house for the area. We're going to try to figure out how to post our grand tour video on either youtube or facebook so everyone can have a look. For the next little while though, it appears that internet access will be minimal, so please send us your love, though if we don't respond quickly, please don't take it as a slight.

This will be an incredible adventure - difficult, but incredible. For those of you who plan to come visit, prepare yourself as your arrival will increase the caucasian population of vientesiete from two to three. Enjoy the cold weather back home, at least half of team wander is madly envious of you.

Adios,
TeamWander

P.S. We don't have much internet access these days, so please make comments and send us emails anyway - but don't be sad if we don't respond immediately.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

No food stories yet? :) Happy Birthday Miah!

Jessica said...

My heart aches that I missed you two while you were in NC! But fear not, I plan to visit you sometime in the next 12 months (hopefully sooner rather than later), and probably with a certain gentleman friend in tow :) I love you both, and wish you the best in your fresh start in Costa Rica!

Liza said...

You all are wonderful! Thank you for my little surprise. I love it very much. I can't wait to get the tour via internet.

I became a wolfpack member for this semester and classes start tomorrow. Yay!

Lots of love to you!!

Jessica said...

Hey! Here's a thought - can you guys give us your address? We can start testing the reliability of the Costa Rican postal system ;)

Jessica said...

I'm the comment-queen on this thread - I just read about the quake. Are y'all ok? It looks like the epicenter was definitely close enough to you to be felt...

Team Wander said...

jessimac - as far as the postal system goes, our address is something close to "100 meters past the soccer field in ventesiete on the way to paso hondo" ... so we're going to give it a try on our own before anyone sends anything of value. do you want to be our guinea pig - maybe you could mail us an empty envelope :-) We'll see if we can track the real dirección.