Hola amigos,
Welcome back to the next chapter in our Costa Rica adventure. At the present I am going to discourse upon the weather, housing, the living styles of the natives and hiking in a real cloud forest.
So, the weather, now you must know that it rains nearly every day this time of year. It is the rainy season which will end in December, when the dry season starts. Sometimes it rains really hard for about 5 minutes then it stops suddenly. You know it’s going to rain sometime during the day so you always bring an umbrella wherever you go. The dry season is when most tourists visit Costa Rica. It literally is 80 degrees all the time with only a 10 degree difference throughout the year. I personally am looking forward to having my birthday in summer! It does get a little chilly up in the mountains, but San Jose is the perfect place because it is right in middle of hot and chilly. Hence, it is where most of the population live.
All right, now the houses. since it rains all the time down here all the houses are made from tile or cement. Even inside the houses they don’t have any carpet and very little timber. Homes are also gated; they are all squished together and heavily gated because apparently crime is a big problem down here. Our floor is usually slightly dirty and it is very common to see ants crawling around on the floor looking for things to eat. The internet in our house is really crappy and goes out whenever it feels like it. We often have fights that include “Your taking up all the internet!” and “Who has their internet on? I’m trying to do my math!” Sometimes it can get pretty loud as we only have three bedrooms, one main room and no yard.
The natives have a very different lifestyle than I am used to. From the couple of houses I have seen I have a vague idea of what life is like. They have no air conditioning so they just leave the door or the window open to cool off, though I haven’t seen any hot spells yet. Most families only have one or two kids, probably because they just can’t afford much more than that. Most people can walk wherever they need to go and some don’t even own a car!
Costa Rica doesn’t do daylight savings so we are on mountain time until fall. As a result, it gets dark at around 6pm and dawn is around 5pm which throws off my sleep schedule a little bit. People never apologize for being late because being late is the fad down here. Most people usually arrive 30-40 minutes late, but hey 8:45 still has an “8” in it. They have a cash system which divides the bills in the thousands; so they have the 1 mil (Spanish for thousand), the 2 mil, the 5 mil, the 10 mil, and the 20 mil (which is about 40 bucks). I mean why would you ever need more than $40 in cash?
The other day we drove an hour or two to a cloud forest (which is a wet tropical forest that can be in the clouds sometimes). We paid about $80 for the whole family to walk through what looked like a jungle. We were rewarded by seeing a toucan, a sloth, and a little monkey. We hiked for a good while and barely made it back to the pavilion before the rains came down and the floods came up. That was our field trip for the week because a lot of us were sick nearing the end of the week.
Also, Luke and Autumn finally learned how to swing by themselves which frees up hours of mytime. Well folks that’s it for this week, tune in next time to hear about our new rental house.
No comments:
Post a Comment