Broken car!

Not sure what's wrong with it, but certainly wishing we lived in a more walkable place. At least we have a couple of bikes, so we can ride out and rent a machine somewhere...

What we do when the kids are at school

Usually we sit at home and read and write, or worry about unimportant things, but sometimes we meditate next to the pool-volleyball net:

 Sometimes we go out. We sometimes go for bike rides:

Today we did a couple of errands by bIke and then stopped by the local beach. Nadia went for a jog along the beach and had a swim:  

I sat in a shady spot and wrote:

The beach wasn't very crowded. It was nice. After we got back to the house, Nadia talked to a friend back in Boston, and I fixed our car's back door, whose handle seemed to have broken. The trick was a lot of WD-40 and some judicious prying with a screwdriver. Now I'm about to go pick up the kids from school.

Nicaragua trip, day four

A few more random pictures. This morning we went out to find breakfast. Here's the side of the Cathedral:

Here are Gabriel and I, hungry...

The bakery we had been going to was closed, so we ended up at the Garden Cafe again. The food was great, and a guy from Antwerp took our picture after Nadia took one of him and his wife:

Then we walked back across the square...

... to our hotel. I thought it was funny that the apparently old facade actually dates only from about 2004. For fifty years before that, the hotel had a pretty ugly, somewhat modernist front, all monochrome and blocky. Before the fifties, the facade was colonial-looking, but not nearly as ornately so as the current one.

In the hotel room, we packed, then paused...

And then went down to our taxi. The taxi we took this time was in pretty bad shape, and seemed to be  boiling off the water in its radiator at a dangerous rate. THe driver had to stop every fifteen mnutes or so to water the thing. At one of the stops, I took a picture of this bus, which was one of the less brightly painted buses we saw in Nicaragua. Why didn't I take a shot of a bright one?! Oh well.

The landscape was beautiful again. A lot of the ranches had windmills to pump water out of the ground for the cows to drink. (I wondered if any of them were, like the one at our place in Canada, made in Beatrice, Nebraska). You can see one in the background here:

THere were a fair number of bikes on the highway, as well as horse-drawn carts. At one point we passed a horse cart that was pulling two bikes with it: one guy, unfortunately not visible in the picture, was sitting in the cart with his bike and another was holding onto the side and letting the horse pull him. If this were the Tour de France, he'd be disqualified... 

 

We passed by the big white windmills again. There were dozens of them!

At the border, we waited while numerous forms and receipts were filled out and officially stamped. 

Then we walked the muddy road of the crossing itself:

I was carrying a big backpack, and I had a moment of wishing I had hired one of these guys to carry it:

Then on the drive back to Nosara, along the coast for a change, we passed a little place that had a house made from a shipping container. You can see it in the background here:

And then we were back, and we jumped in our own swimming pool and tried to appreciate it.

Nicaragua trip, days two and three

We talked to a lot of people and did a lot of stuff, and most of it didn't end up being photographed, but that's life. 

Gabriel skated on the street...

...and in the very large suite that the hotel moved us into after the first night:

Gabriel and I also got haircuts at a great barber shop. I hadn't had my hair professionally cut since I was about eighteen, and Gabriel had never had it done. These guys were great:

This barber shop was not super fancy, and was full of regular locals, but it too had a cool courtyard garden:

Simone bought a new hat, and did a lot of writing and drawing:

She also used the king bed (in which we all four slept!) as a gymnastics mat. Here she does a chin roll, or something:

We had good food in Granada. I liked a dish called "ropa vieja" ("old clothes") and a kind of meat tamale called a "nacatamal". Here we are at a restaurant on the main drag from the cathedral to the lake, which has been pedestrianized and yet still seems to have a fair number of Nicas hanging out on it too:

Here's some part of the main square. I'm not sure exactly why we took this picture, but whatever, it shows something:

When Gabriel and I went out looking for skate spots we saw a team or club of bikers getting ready to go out for a ride. A second after I took this picture, their support van turned up. 

In this next shot, Gabriel is like, Why are you taking another picture of us out at another restaurant? And he's right; one of the downsides of hotel living is that you have to find a restaurant for every meal. This restaurant was by the lake, which is in that width of blinding brightness past the table of other diners. 

By the afternoon of the third day the kids were tired of walking around, so we took them to a "spa" at another hotel, which had an even bigger pool than ours, and we hung out for a while:

Simone drew and wrote:

Gabriel and I played ping-pong. He won.

We also bought a bunch of stuff, including some painted clay whistles in the shapes of little birds. Women were selling them everywhere. The most common thing men sold were sunglasses. Here's Nadia trying a little whistle out, with help from Simone:

And here's Simone blowing through one herself:

Nicaragua trip, day one

This is going to be a bit boring, but I'm writing it up for the record, and because it was interesting to us!

Like a lot of Americans in Costa Rica, we are on 3 month tourist visas, so every 90 days we are supposed to leave Costa Rica for at least 72 hours. There are apparently ways to just go up to the border, pay someone off (we hear 20 bucks will do it), and save yourself the trouble and expense of three days away, but like a lot of people who haven't done it before, we were happy to turn our visa run into a little vacation to Granada, Nicaragua, the oldest (European) city in the Americas and supposedly one of the prettiest. And it was a good trip overall. As usual, the pictures we take are a random lot.

Before we left, Simone did some gymnastics in her room...

...and Gabriel went to the skatepark, and Nadia and I did our usual this and that--but we also spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out where to stay in Granada. We were trying to decide between a "homestay" and a hotel. We thought a homestay could be a nice way to get beyond the tourist experience and also to speak a bit more Spanish. Homestays are also pretty inexpensive; for all four of us, a homestay in Granada costs $48 total per night, all meals included. The other option was staying at a hotel. The main advantage of a hotel was that our kids wanted it, and after having brought them against their will for a year away from their home and their friends, we do try to take their desires into account.

Nevertheless, we ended up reserving a homestay, and though Simone was a bit worried when the community center that organizes homestays couldn't find us a family without a dog, the kids accepted our decision pretty gracefully.

On Thursday, we hit the road. It was a pretty drive, through classic Guanacastecan (?) cowboy country, past Costa Rica's second city, Liberia, and then up on a nearly deserted road to the crossing. At the border, a muddy stretch of road dominated by long lines of tractor trailer trucks, we parked our car at the house of a guy named Jesus, who lives right next to the crossing (we saw our friends' car parked there too!). Then we stopped at the restaurant for a bathroom and soda break:

Then we had about 45 minutes of showing our passports, filling out forms, walking on the muddy road, showing our passports, fending off guides and touts, walking on more mud, showing our passports, paying a city tax, showing our passports, filling out another form, paying the $48 entry fee, walking through mud, showing our passports, finding a taxi, and paying off the guide and taxi tout we hadn't been able to shake and who had actually been somewhat useful.

The taxi driver, Erwing, drove us fast through the very flat countryside, which was beautiful, and much like Guanacaste: fields and cows. The human stuff was a bit poorer (many fewer private cars, for one thing) and a bit more colorful than Costa Rica--but the big differences were the lake and volcanos and the windmills:

We drove past Rivas, a slightly smaller city that is remembered largely for the two battles that took place there in the 1850s, the first one that led to American Filibuster William Walker's taking over the country, and the second one, when Costa Rican forces defeated Walker's forces, that led to Walker's loss of power. The city was also, Erwing told us, where an important treaty between the Spanish and the Indians was signed in the 1500s.

As we approached Granada we saw the city's impressive volcano, Mombacho whose blown top supposedly created the many islands in the lake near the city:

We soon found ourselves at the community center that had arranged our homestay. Juan Carlos showed us some local kids were getting English lessons in the front room, and we met a guy from Europe who was volunteering at the center this year, and then the mother and daughter from the homestay family came by and we walked with them the five minutes to their house.

At the house we were greeted by a loudly barking little dog (Simone leapt up into Nadia's arms) and a few very polite and friendly children, one of whom, Milton, was reading the same Harry POtter book as Simone. The house itself was long and narrow--pretty much one room wide. It was, surprisingly to me, full of stuff. I didn't expect a Nicaraguan house to be even more cluttered than ours! The rooms were small and dark, and full of stuff--family photos, a TV, clothes, etc. It seemed clear that we were displacing some family members--who, it wasn't clear. Gabriel asked to use the bathroom and the mother showed him, a little apologetically, to a little booth in the hallway. She told me that the next night we could have the room they normally gave guests, a larger room with a private bath, but the first night there were some other people staying in that room.

The house was seemed pretty small for their family of 9 and our family of 4 and the two other guests, and with the little dog yapping nonstop Simone was in Nadia's arms the whole time, but it was all pretty friendly, and we were determined to make the best of it.

We left our stuff in our rooms and set out on foot for the center of the city. The city got more and more clean and fancy as we went. It looked something like this, only with more people on the sidewalks (I don't know how Nadia got this shot with no ife in it but the horse-drawn carriage coming up the street):

When we got to the city's main square, we stopped in a cafe for a snack, and found that those plain and somewhat forbidding doorways can lead to surprisingly spacious and open houses with garden courtyards, fountains, and shady arcades. Refreshed, we went out to the main square and immediately bumped into a bunch of friends from Nosara--the same ones whose car we had seen at the border. They had gotten a hotel room, and their kids were very excited about how luxurious it was, how nice the pool was, etc. They wanted to show us, and our kids wanted to see, so we followed them into another interior of pillared courtyards, tiled staircases, dark wood furniture and leafy plants. We told the kids we could come back for a swim later. They could have jumped in right away:

Our friends had just had a big meal, but we were ready for dinner, so we split up and said we'd meet later. As soon as we left, Gabriel and Simone started talking about how incredibly jealous they were that Nadav and Roy and Tara got to stay in a nice hotel, while we had to stay in a dirty cramped house with a yapping dog and, for thirteen people, a single bathroom with, Gabriel said, a broken toilet that didn't flush. We sympathized, but said we'd stay in lots of nice hotels later on. We were going to have a nice family experience and speak some Spanish, darn it.

For dinner we headed to a restaurant the hotel had recommended, called "Imagine," which turned out to have walls covered with paintings and photos of John Lennon and a menu with entrees ranging from $20 to $40. So we headed across the street to a beautiful restaurant with more normal prices and what turned out to be excellent food. They also had hammocks. 

After dinner, we walked around the city. There were a lot of foreigners, and a lot of fairly fancy houses and hotels. The inequality was pretty stark. People were quite friendly, and no one ever made us feel uncomfortable, but we felt uncomfortable anyway (story of our life here). It struck me that the big beautiful Colonial-style houses in Granada--palaces, really--had been built by what must have been a very rich elite, and that the foreigners who were moving in, well-meaning as they were, were essentially taking the place of the elite.  I thought, Wow, if I had been a Nicaraguan a hundred years ago I would have been a socialist. Then I thought, Well, I'm basically a socialist already, so... And of course I thought, as I often do, that our position as expats in Nosara is basically that of colonizers...

All of this perhaps should have made us all the more happy to be going back to a typical (even well above average) Nicaraguan family house. By the time we got back to the main square, however, where we intended to get a taxi back to our homestay, we couldn't go through with it. Instead, I went in and got a hotel room and Nadia took a taxi back to the homestay by herself to make our apologies and get our stuff. 

So we gave up on living with real Nicaraguans, and accepted our role as colonizing gringos who stay in luxury with our own kind.  Perhaps only spoiled Americans could feel like a yearlong vacation was a lesson in accepting difficult realities, but still, this was yet another ironic lesson in humility.  There are levels and levels and levels...

The next post--about days two and three of our trip--will be mostly pictures.

Frog on the patio

Since I started putting up stuff like this, I'm bound to continue. This guy startled me. I didn't seem to startle him...

Yesterday's sunset

More people now--the tourist season is starting...

Three little birds

Bad camera, but...

A weekend in the country (day two)

Today we woke up pretty early, to the sounds of birds and monkeys. After a pleasant breakfast, we went for a hike up to the top of one of the many little peaks around the lodge. There's a lookout tower up there (un mirador!) and the views were nice.

You could see the Gulf of Nicoya:

Some farmland, and a lot of forest.

Then Simone and Nadia went down ahead of the rest of us:

On the way down, Arnolfo showed us what I think is a jicara fruit, which can be used to play soccer with.

He also showed us many flowers and insects and leaves that seem to bleed if you rub them and plants that shrivel and droop at the slightest touch, and bright caterpillars that will become butterflies, and so on. For some reason, the only thing I seem to have taken a picture of is this, which I think is a termite's nest:

When we got back, we hung out on the porch for a while.

I read a book about Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry. It was good.

After lunch, Simone planted a tree. I forget its name, but its wood is apparently very, very hard.

We hung out some more:

Then we packed up and got ready to go. We took a couple of group shots. Us:

Arnolfo and Mari:

On the walk out, as on all the other walks, we crossed a lot of ant trails. The ants were often carrying little pieces of leaves. You can't quite see them in these pictures, but they looked like long lines of thousands of movers setting up an exhibition for an artist who only painted gigantic canvases of solid green:

 Simone didn't like the ants, because ants are sometimes biting, but I thought they were cool. Anyway... We also crossed the river a lot. Here's Gabriel at crossing number seven:

At one of the crossings we stopped and had a swim. That's Simone going down the chute of whitewater...

At the bottom of the trail we took the shot we should have taken coming in:

Here's the tree above:

Then we got down to the car and drove away. There were again the bucolic, Vermont-like scenes:

But we also passed a horseback riding competition in a local village. These guys seemed to be competing to see who could ride really fast under a clothesline and stick a clothespin up onto it--or maybe grab a clothespin off of it--we didn't stop to find out which.

The clouds were already threatening, and before we got back to Nosara it was pouring, and at one point along the coast road we had to drive through a huge, knee-deep puddle a few hundred yards long. But we made it, and now some of us are sleeping and some writing or reading (RAFA!)