Picking Up Our Car, Going to the Big City

Our Sixth Week

We will be driving to San Jose on Monday morning to pick up our car, the Honda CRV we shipped from Michigan. We will stay in the area so we can meet with our attorney on Tuesday and do some shopping for things we can't find here in the southern region. One of the funniest things John wants to find are wooden clothes pins. All we can find are little plastic ones, made here in Costa Rica. It is rather odd when you hear two men discussing the clothes pins on the line. One of our part-time neighbors had wooden clothes pins on his clothesline and when John spotted them, he immediately asked Shannon where he got them...Walgreens in Texas, his home state. There they sit so proudly on his clothesline and every time we drive by, I want to snatch them off the line!!

We feel at times we have gone back to living in the 60s. Here in the southern region towns and stores resemble the 60s. Public bathrooms remind me of traveling when I was a little girl. Gas stations pump your gas. Costa Ricans make do with much less, much like it was in the 60s. No Fast Food Chains in the southern area. (One McDonalds 1 hour away) And we don't mind a bit that things are less here; it fits us well.

Serenity is Growing

Currently there are three houses. We rent one, Aldemar lives in another and the Octagon house will soon be occupied. We have another woman coming this week!! Currently I am the only woman around here so I am anxious to have her here. With all the men that work here, employed by Serenity and also the construction sites, I am greatly out numbered. The new woman's name is Diane! Imagine the confusion that will arise with that! “Oh, you're Diane? I saw John with a different woman just yesterday!”

We have three more houses under construction and a fourth to start in the near future. It won't be long before we have a neighborhood!

Our Basement and Foundation

Old Farmer's Fence Post in our yard

Epiphytes grow in trees and posts every where

 

Blossoms from a Water Apple Tree in our Yard.

It is over 45 feet tall, a beautiful tree.

 

One of our construction site workers

rides his horse to work.

 

 

 

His horse at our job site

 

Aldemar picked these bananas this week. That’s a LOT of bananas!!

  Good thing John now likes bananas, never liked them in Michigan.

 

And finally (didn't want you think we live everyday in paradise)...this spider dropped on John's head when we came in the laundry room door one night!!  That is a piece of paper to get size reference.  Glad it was him and not me!! 

Notes from San Jose
Tonight we are in a hotel room, have to stay the night here to take care of business tomorrow.  Picked up our car today, it came in prefect condition.  John knows how to pack a container right!!!

San Jose has all the modern stores and conveniences.  Actually we are in a suburb, called Santa Anna.  Even though you can find most things you want and need here, we will give them up to have the beauty and peacefulness of the southern zone.  TOO MUCH TRAFFIC HERE!!!
We are not city people and it drives us nuts!  So we will go back to lots of jungle vegetation and 60s towns because that is what drew us here.  I love to sit at our property (on weekends when the workers aren't around) as the sun is going down and watch the mountains and scenery turn to dusk.  I listen to the birds, hear the cows mooing on the next mountain over and watch them head in for the night, we heard owls last night, sometimes a howler monkey will call out and just enjoy the serenity of our new home site. 

Who Did We Use to Move?

I have been asked who we used to help us with our move to Costa Rica.  Kevin at Great Sunrises helped us with our shipping, both household and car, applying for our residency, opening a bank account, and much more.  If it is something you need to move to CR, Kevin is the guy.

We are very happy with his service and employees.  We highly recommend his company.

All our belongings came; nothing stolen.  Kevin set us up with a nice attorney to apply for our residency applications.  All the meetings with the embassy, police department, picture taking, etc. went like clockwork.  When interviewing different companies for the job we were told things that never even happened such as, don't bring any electronic equipment because it costs too much for import taxes and with another company not to pack our own boxes, they would have to do it all themselves and number each item.  We hated that idea, it would cost too much and we wanted to pack our own boxes.  As for import taxes, Kevin and his employees, helped us get our values claimed on items to very reasonable costs.  Mostly we used garage sale prices, what you would get for items in a sale. 

If you check him out be sure to tell him Johnny and Diane Franklin sent you, he does have a referral reward.  But that is not why we are recommending his company, believe me if there had been problems, we would not send you there.  Drop me a line too so I can follow up on it.

Web Site
www.greatsunriseenterprisescostarica.com

We Got Our Stuff!!

Hooray! We now are sleeping on a real bed, can sit on a couch, cook with enough pots and pans, have tools and many more things that make life easier. The biggest plus is the bed, no more air mattress! And now that we are off the floor we have discovered we are not cold in the wee hours of the morning. Ahhhh!!! That bed has never felt so good!

 

Our contents came (with delays at every turn; Detroit, New York, the Bahamas & Customs) on Wednesday. We were first told to expect our contents Saturday. Boo Hoo...Wednesday seems like a long way from Saturday. Each night extra on that air mattress was another slap in the face, or should I say slap on our backs? (Actually, our backs are doing pretty good. Tropical life agrees with us.)

We have found only one thing broken, a gallon glass jar, no big deal. We haven't found anything stolen (common from what we hear) and most boxes were never even opened. We heard that Brazil is really bad for things stolen from shipments.

Moving Crew—Thankfully Aldemar and two of his workers here at Serenity helped unload the truck. Although we paid for the 3 man crew that drove it here to unload, the extra guys got it done pretty fast and they appreciated that they made some extra cash.

Basement Dug!

The building permit was finally granted and we broke ground today, Friday, February 14^th. Happy Valentines Day!! John gave me a hole in the ground for Valentines Day!! Yahoo!!

The builder says the house should take 5 months to complete, turn-key. I am very grateful for this rental house but it will be so exciting to move into a house we designed that has the things we want. It is a little higher elevation than this house so a little cooler and has a stronger breeze.

Monkeys Came Back

We had monkeys in the trees next to the house again this week. There were bunches of them, too many to count. They eat leaves, flowers and buds high up in the branches and move along the river eating as they go.

Iguanas, the “squirrels” of Costa Rica.

Iguanas run out into the roads and they run fast!! We see them all the time although never have seen them in our yard or on jungle walks here in Serenity. Still haven't seen another sloth. I imagine they are in the trees around here but they are really hard to spot. On our CR tours last year, it took a wild life expert to point them out to us. Aldemar tells me he has seen Toucans around here lately, but I haven't. He knows more what to look and listen for. We did see a 8 foot long snake in the river the other day a on walk. But typically you don't see much of snakes. I used to see more snakes in the gardens at Rocky Gardens than we have here.

 

We have a routine now of going to San Isidro each Thursday for shopping and business. We come home with a week's worth of fruit, veggies, meat and fish from the farmer's market and breads from the La panaderia for under $40.00.

Internet?

Not yet, we are very unhappy to say. We can get a signal if we go up the mountain to our property but must pay for time on our netbook and Ipad. We can make phone calls up there also. No TV and Vonage phone here at the house. I read when I have time on my hands and we still go to bed early. John is thrilled to have “jobs” around the house now that we have our stuff. He fixes things, sets up things and all kinds of things now that he has tools. All in all, life is good and relaxing.

I went to pick up my shoe...!!

Second big spider in the laundry room!

Our day at the beach last Sunday

Oxen in our local town

Worry...A Waste of Time

Worry, a Waste of Time

When I was a kid, I remember a sermon where worry was described as a sin because that meant you weren't trusting in God to take care of you. Not sure where I stand on such a harsh pronouncement of worry but I do know that much of what we worry about never comes to pass. We FINALLY received our container contents, after countless delays, in Detroit, New York, the Bahamas, and finally with Customs here in Costa Rica.

Our Moving Crew

Aldemar (our favorite Tico) is in the middle in a stripped shirt, his Serenity crew to the right.

 

Imagine that John and Diane Franklin reduced their life belongings to fit in this truck!! 

I am so proud of us!

 

Here were our list of worries:

Although we thought we were going to avoid it, our container got caught up in the Holidays and three weeks were lost. The container never left Detroit for over a week and New York for 2 weeks after it left our house.

Freezing cold weather...would liquid contents freeze and burst causing problems with customs and our boxes leaking? (I lost a bit of sleep over that one.)

Stealing (many people told us how they were looted when they shipped.)

Breakage (Oh! The reports of breakage were horrendous!)

Customs finding questionable items and trashing our boxes looking for more.

Customs questioning what were we planning on doing with all the gardening/farming items and having trouble with it.

What if our contents got mixed up with another container (like mixed up babies in a hospital) and we were sent someone else's belongings?

As you can see, the worries were many. BUT I am pleased to say, we have only found one broken item and no theft. Most of our boxes were never even opened by Customs; we might have spotted 2 boxes out of almost 250! We aren't sure if they were opened or not. Almost all the boxes had our original taping still intact.

For Those Moving to Costa Rica...

I recently found out that I have some readers of this blog that are following it because they are planning a move to CR and want more information. For those readers here are some tips for shipping household goods:

• Choose a shipper that originates here in CR. Our shipper has contacts and inspectors that he selects personally and he followed our progress the whole way. Don't select a company from your home country.
• Pay extra for loading time. The allotted 2 hours is simply not enough to pack the container properly and secure the contents to prevent breakage. John packed our container for 5 days! We had to pay extra but because John packed everything so tight and carefully, we didn't have breakage. If you are just going to throw things into a container in the allotted time and not pack carefully, why bother? Sell your stuff and buy new once you arrive because it will likely be damaged.
• Wrap furniture and anything that can break thoroughly. We bought lots of bubble wrap, had Styrofoam, sheets, blankets, mattress covers and LOTS of tape. We couldn't believe how much tape we went through. We had friends picking up more tape for us even after buying lots, twice!
• Only ship household goods you don't want to part with because maybe they are sentimental or of good quality. We mostly gave our sentimental items to family but had quality household goods that we knew we either couldn't find here or it was cheaper to ship. Finding quality items in Costa Rica is hard, especially in the southern zone.
• Here is something we didn't do but only if we could do it over again! (Again? No Way! It was really hard and impossible without friends helping.) Anyway...try your hardest to figure out what you need right away and pay extra for boxes to fly with you, (we did do that.) What we didn't figure beforehand was to pack boxes that had contents we needed right away in the rental house while waiting for our house to be built. We didn't plan well on that and had to go through way too many boxes, finding maybe a few things in each box that we needed now. We have most of the boxes in storage and couldn't find everything we really need right now.
• When you ship household goods, you have to inventory the boxes and number them; which we did. We thought we had done a pretty good at this but have found we needed to be more specific with our personal column. We had a column for ourselves that the shipper and Customs didn't see and just deleted our column when we emailed them their copy. Their list looked more generic; such as “misc used kitchen items” or “misc. personal items” or “hand tools”, etc. If we would have done this in more detail we could have found items that we know are in the stacks somewhere, just can't find them because we didn't open up every box.

It is wonderful to have our belongings. Kinda like old friends showing up (actually having some friends show up would be better!) It was a odd feeling when the back of the truck was opened up and I recognized old blanket and old sheet wrapped around things. Strange how being without your “stuff” makes you REALLY desire it, even an old blanket can trigger a smile!

A few more of Serenity's workers. 

This is how they cut acres and acres of grass in

Serenity, by machete!!  But they are happy to have work that Ex-Pats bring. 

Monkeys At My Doorstep!! More Pictures

Big Surprise!

I stepped out on the porch to sweep it and noticed things dropping out of the trees about 30 feet away from the house. I have been telling John how much I wanted to see monkeys in our neighborhood. John has been apprehensive about monkeys in our yard, he feels all monkeys steal. I kept trying to convince him Howler monkeys don't steal; which are the type we would have. Stepping off the porch I got a big surprise!! Seven monkeys next to the house up in the trees, howler monkeys! Papa, Mama, baby and 4 others. We got some decent pictures also!

Our builder has put in our driveway and built the living quarters for the workers and set up the water supply from the mountain this week. The workers will be living on site for 5 months according to the builder. They have sleeping areas, kitchen, toilet and outdoor shower. Just waiting for the permits to be in hand and they are ready to go!

This the builders home for the next 5 months

I wanted to take a picture of all we bought at the farmer's market this week but thought you might be too jealous to enjoy seeing it all. Cooking here is pretty enjoyable, at least for now. Hope it remains a joy to have tons of veggies and fruit, fresh ocean fish, fresh chicken and grass fed beef to make meals with. It is so easy to be creative and make very tasty dishes. Yesterday I made a very delicious mango salsa for our ocean fish; amazing meal with delicious broccoli and fresh salad. So far we haven't found a restaurant with a fish dinner that good.

The past 12 years following Weston A Price and Nourishing Traditions has prepared me for cooking here. If you want to eat well in Costa Rica you better know how to cook from scratch, any foods brought in from other countries are expensive. And I am even still cooking for dogs! I make broth and meat scraps for Concinaero, a very nice black/white dog that lives nearby. Each day he comes by for a meal, just like “Tramp” in Lady and the Tramp.

John planting a banana tree on our property

 I have lots of dogs visit us but this one is my favorite.  Aldemar let me name her, I chose Lilly.

 

Loved the jungle the first time, had to go further on another.  This is in Serenity, in our little village.

 

Love, Diane

Builder Selected, Farmers Market and Our Second Week

We selected our builder who is anxious to getting going on our house. We have the house plans, finally, from the architect. Just waiting on building permit.

Thursday we went to a very large city, San Isidro, about an hour away with our builder and his wife, Christian and Charlotte. After we completed some business at the bank they took us to a HUGE Farmers Market. There was so much there. One picture can't even begin to show you how big it is. We can get about anything we need related to agriculture there. Honey, jam, of course fruit and veggies (some of which we have no clue what they are), fish, meat, sausage, cane sugar in a block that you dissolve for your drink or recipe or grate it, bread and a little crafts. We will be going back on regular basis to get things.

Farmer's Market in San Isidro

We then went to lunch with Christian and Charlotte. They took us to a restaurant we would like to go back to if we can ever find it! Charlotte is from Pennsylvania, been here for 8 years with her Costa Rican husband. So she obviously speaks English and so does Christian. It is surprising how many Costa Rican men in the building trade spent years in the US. It usually results in pretty good English so it makes it much easier for us to communicate.

John's Domestic Side

Retirement has brought out a side in John that I haven't seen before. Today he swept the house (his idea) while I did breakfast dishes. Then we did laundry together in a Tico Washing Machine. You put your clothes in one side, turn on the hose to fill with water, add soap and let it agitate. Then you put the clothes in the other side, run water on the clothes as it spins out the water to rinse and extract water. Aldemar (found out his email doesn't reflect the correct spelling of his name) just bought a Tico washer and is willing to share it with us until our belongings arrive. The clothes then were hung up outside here at our house; all shared together.

We were getting a few bug bites several days ago but could never see what was biting us. I started applying a very small amount of Avon Skin So Soft and no more bites. Much nicer than putting insect repellent on. John said putting SSS on me also resulted in no more bites on him! Haha! Two for one! So when you come down to take your cheap tropical vacation in our upstairs guest lodge you might want to bring some Avon SSS. Doubt I can get it here.

We have found going down the mountain (and back up again) on the Pacific side is much harder than finding what we need up here in the mountains. We have a town about 20 minutes away, Pejibaye, and if we need a big city going to San Isidro, 45 minutes from there, is the best. The drive to San Isidro is one of the prettiest drives I have seen in Costa Rica. Can't wait to take you there!

Time to take off my sundress and put on pants and shirt as it is getting cooler. Nights can get chilly but nothing like what I hear you are experiencing! Wow! BRUTAL Norte Americana Invierno (winter). I really am sorry that the lows and highs are so bad. My heart is with you all!

Bye!

Love, Diane

Animals and Camping

Animals and Camping

We had a wonderful surprise today, we got to meet our new cows! They aren't really our cows like we had to do in Michigan. In Michigan we had to buy into cow shares and “own” a cow. Then we could pay for care of our cow and get her milk. But here we only had to ask Aldemar if he knew where we could get fresh cow milk and bingo! His parents raise dairy cows and they are only 5 minutes from here! We got to see the cows being milked and experience milk that was so fresh and yummy.

You might wonder what about the goat milk we have mentioned as part of our food supply being part of the community in Serenity. Well...since we are the first residents (Aldemar lives here too as the caretaker, he takes care of the grounds, plants, chickens, weeding, watering, etc.) there are no goats yet. Serenity needs more people to warrant the care of goats. Also we prefer cow milk, probably because that is the flavor we are accustom to.

Aldemar's parents are asking for .60 cents for 2 liters of milk! We already told him we can't pay that little and will be paying his parents more. If you met them you would want to help them too.

Here are the puppies I get to play with each day. And just like being grandparents, I get to give them back to Oldemar for care and feeding. It is perfect! I get the best part of puppies, playing and cuddling with them.

There is no shortage of dogs around here. It appears that the custom around CR, if you work outside in rural area and if you are a guy, you have a dog and take the dog to work with you. The dogs seem mostly young and John and I think that Serenity, since it is on the cusp of many new homes and much activity, will have to make some kind of rule that to bring your dog you will have to have it fixed or there will be sooooo many puppies that we will be overrun with them.

Camping

We will be “camping” in our rental house much longer than we had planned. Our container is held up due to too much traffic and doesn't have a port date until around February 7^th. Camping in the house with running water and toilet is not too bad. But the things that make us happy and excited are pretty funny. Like today I bought a bowl/juicer combo unit and was thrilled while making lunch that I had a “ bowl”! I am trying to keep my purchases to a minimum because our container has plenty of kitchen do-dads. I still haven't thrown away a coffee cup that John bought coffee in on the trip down. It is handy to use as a smaller lip container to move liquids into smaller containers, like lemon juice from a bowl into a water bottle.

Or in the wee hours of today, it was chilly and our summer weight blanket just wasn't cutting it for warmth, even John was chilly in bed. So I got our bath towels and sweatshirts to put over top of our blanket as another layer. It really helped and we slept comfortably until 6am. We go to bed early and get up early since there is no internet or TV. We don't have any games or cards so going to bed seems like the best choice. Every week, every month of the year, it is the same...sunrise around 5am, sunset at 5:45pm, dark by 6:15pm. It was really great when we looked at John's watch at it was 8:30am but it seemed like it was noon. I have always been a morning person, love mornings, so this fits me well. Not sure about John, he just goes with the flow. He probably doesn’t even know what he prefers.

John is off now to find some materials, lots of stuff in back of the chicken coop, to make clothes rods so we can hang up our clothes. This house is old European style, no closets, not a one. Although it was taken down to the foundation last year and rebuilt, it isn't American style. So we have no place to hang our clothes. We have 3 bedrooms but no closets. We must get organized before our container contents arrive so we can fill the 2 extra bedrooms and back porch with our boxes. We will put furniture in living areas as much as possible, it is a small house. Sure beats renting a storage space somewhere else. We will live here at least 4 months. The builder is going to try to get us into our new house as soon as possible, he doesn't have another job right now and he also wants to impress prospective Serenity customers with his speed and quality workmanship. There is every reason in the book to do our house right.

As I am sitting here on the porch in a sundress, it is getting cool. Time to make my fourth change for the day. I start out with long sleeves and pants, move to short sleeves, then to a sundress. Finally back into long sleeves and pants. I feel like a little girl constantly changing her clothes.

 One of Brahma cows supplying us with milk

 

 

 Aldemar's father proud with his cow

 

 

Father's horse, pretty spunky for an old horse!