Yesterday, just after noon, I went into the nearby ATH (A Todo Hora, which is the Costa Rican version of “ATM”) to check my Scotiabank balance. Lo and behold, after two weeks of wrangling account, Swift, IBAN, and beneficiary numbers back and forth with the Bank of Montreal, my money finally arrived! I danced a [...]
Augh.
I called it yesterday, when I got my new cell phone. A month ago, we ordered phones over the internet. They were shipped US Postal Service. They entered Costa Rica on 8 July. And then sat in customs. When I got my Nokia, I said (knowing this was truth) that our eBay-ordered phones would show [...]
Note today’s date: 8 August 2008. That’s (almost) two months since we first came to Costa Rica. Two months ago, we tried to start getting things like cars, bank accounts, work visas (a fairly significant need), and cell phones, as these were the things we felt were necessary to be able to do our jobs [...]
I had promised Alex that the second weekend we were in Costa Rica would be spent away from our apartment. I just had to find the right place to go. So I spent a fair bit of time working out the location, time to get to the location (because any estimates of travel time here [...]
Way back in June — the 13th, to be specific (I guess that should have been a first sign, eh?) — I packed up a whack of things on my desk to bring down to Costa Rica. TeamMG (Mary and Morgan) arranged for this to be shipped down here by FedEx, a company I had [...]
When we started planning this crazy little excursion to Costa Rica oh-so-many months ago, there was always the need for me to leave in advance of my family, and then come back to get them. The logistics of making everything happen were basically impossible to handle any other way. That month away wasn’t easy, which [...]
We tried to survive without cars. Really. We took taxis everywhere, and suffered due to the language barrier and an unfamiliar taxi system. (We’ve been unable to get taxis when we need them — baffling, when you see them driving around — and gouged when meters have been turned on.) We could try the bus [...]
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