Site Visit

This week, Melana and I visited our new site where we be living for the next two years- or at least the next six months. I'll break any suspense that you may have by saying up front that it was wonderful.

The region of Guatuso is very different from where we have been living the last few months. The area outside of San Jose are magnificently mountainous with climates ranging from cool to warm during the day to cool to cold at night. There is a lot of fog as the clouds pass right by our homes on there ascent up the mountain and it is generally humid and rainy in the evenings and afternoons.
You also get magnificent. Views like this one:


And this one:


The new Location, however, is flat - very flat. We're not talking midwest-I've-been-driving-for-six-hours-with-only-billboards-for-company flat, but it's flat for Costa Rica.
It's also much warmer

Our new home is on a little farm set among other pineapple and sugar cane farms. It is surrounded by orange, lemon and lime trees that are populated by a very pretty assortment of tropical birds... and monkeys. Yes, there are monkeys at our new site, howler monkeys to be specific. They like to yell at trucks when they go by (it is THEIR turf after all). Though I haven't seen them, we are also supposed to have smaller capuchins and toucans. According to the family, there are NO tarantulas at our site... which is awesome! It almost makes the 3-4 inch cockroaches easier to bear. There are also chickens, cows and horses about as well as a number of dogs and other critters.
Our whole house seems to be more of an ecosystem than simply a house for people. I'll tell you what I mean, on our second day there our mom killed one of the chickens that was walking around outside, cleaned it and served it to us for dinner. the feathers went into a pile out back, a bunch of the bones went to the dogs (dogs seem to eat chicken bones here without a problem, I don't know what's wrong with our snooty US dogs) and a good deal of the organs were put out back for the vultures and eagles to keep them around so that they would eat the mice in the area. The dogs run loose next to the chickens and protect them from local predators and, in return, are fed milk from the cows every day plus all the scraps from the house. What the dogs don't eat, the chicken or buzzards do. It's pretty amazing.
We also have a pet parrot that walks about the house and will occasionally sneak up on us and squawk very, very loudly.
As far as the family goes, they are a charming old couple, a retired farmer who still busies himself with farm work and a grandmother who is content just being a grandmother. I should also mention that there are 15 grandkids, almost all of whom appear in the house on a daily basis. Our mother cooks for all of the grandkids and a good deal of her five children and their spouses in addition to some friends that occasionally show up. The result of all this activity is a house that looks a lot like a restaurant a lot of the time with piles of dishes and food cooking at an industrial scale. Melana also noted that the children tend to descend upon the kitchen like a swarm of locusts leaving only empty spinning plates settling amid an eerie calm as the dust slowly settles from the recent rush of activity.

I've gone on long enough for now. I'll document more about my site when I'm actually living there. Until then, here are some pictures!