Saturday, August 31, 2013
Sylvester - Julia
This is Sylvester the Toad. We found him in our front yard while it was raining. We probably spent 15 minutes following him around and staring at him :)
Getting Settled & Our House - Hannah
Holy spamoni. My brain hurts. Moving to another country is like doing brain exercises. Everything is so new and there's so much to figure out. But I'm having a great time and learning and loving everything.
Take laundry for example. Here's our laundry room, and Michael trying to set up our washing machine.
We arrived and saw this laundry room. We considered our options. We could hand wash and hang everything to dry. That would be the least expensive. But we decided to buy this washing machine and try to hang our clothes to dry. There's no hot water, so I'm not sure how well it will clean. But maybe it depends on the laundry soap we use.
We can get Tide, but it's super expensive. Or we could get one of the other brands in Spanish. But which one to get? How do we know which one is good? After doing some conversions in our heads, we can figure out which one is the best price, but will that one work? We decide to go with the American brand Sun.
Then we need to find things like clothespins. There's nothing like a Walmart in the town we're in, so it's a matter of finding the right little store downtown that has clothespins.
Anyway, laundry is just one example, and a fairly minor one at that. But we've had to set up our house, figure out about schools, buy groceries, and we're currently trying to figure out about a car. We would not have been able to do any of it without the wonderful people in our LDS branch.
Today I went to the Farmer's Market with Ingrid and her two daughters, Crista and Lauren. Ingrid doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Spanish, but we did okay. She showed me where the market was, told me about what produce was in season and local. Crista helped me pay using my Costa Rican bills and coins. The currency here is called colones. The other day at the bank I withdrew 250,000 colones. I had a hard time pushing OK to get my withdrawal. I kept thinking 250,000 dollars. But with colones, to convert, you have to move the decimal three spaces and then double the number, so 250,000 colones is equivalent to about 500 dollars.
Ingrid took me to a butcher her family trusts--one place for beef, another for chicken, another for fish. They took me to the "super"market and helped me find some ingredients for recipes I'd found.
I don't know how we would have been able to do this without so many people helping us. And the fact that Michael speaks Spanish is certainly helpful as well.
President Lopez was over today showing us some good car options. Silvia took me to the schools a couple days ago. Cristian and Silvia picked us up from the airport and took us to Walmart in San Jose. We met a Canadian in town who gave us his email address and offered to help with anything we need. I met a retired American couple in the market today who is also in our branch. People have been very kind.
Anyway, to switch gears, I thought I'd post some pictures of our house. It's a great house with plenty of room. The floors are all tile. The ceilings are made of beautiful wood. It's surrounded by green forests. We've got mango trees (out of season right now), lime, orange and other things we have yet to discover.
Take laundry for example. Here's our laundry room, and Michael trying to set up our washing machine.
We arrived and saw this laundry room. We considered our options. We could hand wash and hang everything to dry. That would be the least expensive. But we decided to buy this washing machine and try to hang our clothes to dry. There's no hot water, so I'm not sure how well it will clean. But maybe it depends on the laundry soap we use.
We can get Tide, but it's super expensive. Or we could get one of the other brands in Spanish. But which one to get? How do we know which one is good? After doing some conversions in our heads, we can figure out which one is the best price, but will that one work? We decide to go with the American brand Sun.
Then we need to find things like clothespins. There's nothing like a Walmart in the town we're in, so it's a matter of finding the right little store downtown that has clothespins.
Anyway, laundry is just one example, and a fairly minor one at that. But we've had to set up our house, figure out about schools, buy groceries, and we're currently trying to figure out about a car. We would not have been able to do any of it without the wonderful people in our LDS branch.
Today I went to the Farmer's Market with Ingrid and her two daughters, Crista and Lauren. Ingrid doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Spanish, but we did okay. She showed me where the market was, told me about what produce was in season and local. Crista helped me pay using my Costa Rican bills and coins. The currency here is called colones. The other day at the bank I withdrew 250,000 colones. I had a hard time pushing OK to get my withdrawal. I kept thinking 250,000 dollars. But with colones, to convert, you have to move the decimal three spaces and then double the number, so 250,000 colones is equivalent to about 500 dollars.
Ingrid took me to a butcher her family trusts--one place for beef, another for chicken, another for fish. They took me to the "super"market and helped me find some ingredients for recipes I'd found.
I don't know how we would have been able to do this without so many people helping us. And the fact that Michael speaks Spanish is certainly helpful as well.
President Lopez was over today showing us some good car options. Silvia took me to the schools a couple days ago. Cristian and Silvia picked us up from the airport and took us to Walmart in San Jose. We met a Canadian in town who gave us his email address and offered to help with anything we need. I met a retired American couple in the market today who is also in our branch. People have been very kind.
Anyway, to switch gears, I thought I'd post some pictures of our house. It's a great house with plenty of room. The floors are all tile. The ceilings are made of beautiful wood. It's surrounded by green forests. We've got mango trees (out of season right now), lime, orange and other things we have yet to discover.
Here's the front of our house. Feel free to play "Where's Waldo" aka "Where's Dylan" as you browse through the photos. He's hiding in about half of them :).
Here's our front patio.
The green forest in front of our house.
The side of our house.
Our front room--great for rolling hot wheels. It has an entertainment center,
but we'll probably never put a TV in it.
Our kitchen. Notice the pretty wood ceiling.
Our dining room. And Julia working on her Spanish.
Our bedroom. Also where Michael will be working.
Julia and Dylan's room.
Caleb and Jonah's room.
The master bathroom.
The kids' bathroom.
My favorite room. We need a name for it--maybe the glass room?
It's got windows all around.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Arriving in Costa Rica - Michael
Yesterday, when we were about 20 minutes out from landing in San Jose, Costa Rica. The pilot started making his landing announcements. When he said, it is sunny and 75 degrees in San Jose," Hannah and I looked at each other and smiled.
And then we landed.
Thank goodness we had connected with Silvia and Christian Rojas. A brother and sister who had lived in New Jersey for a number of years and speak English very well. They met us at the airport and picked up up to take us to our house, which we are renting from them.
We found out on Tuesday that they would both be coming and would have room for us and our stuff in their two cars (plus a few things we would by at WalMart before leaving San Jose. Finding out they would pick us up was a huge relief, because I had discovered late on Monday night that it was likely going to cost close to $3000 for the rental car we would have needed for the week. (I kept forgetting to get the rental car reserved and wasn't planning to pay so much for the car for one week.)
So Christian and Silvia were a huge help in getting from the airport to our place in Santiago de Puriscal. You can see where it is on the map below.
We had to buy lots of other stuff for the house and Silvia and Christian drove us around to get it. While doing so, I took this picture of Julia and Jonah drinking with a straw straight from a coconut. That was good stuff. Silvia is in the background to the right of Julia.
Last night after all the work of getting ready to go and traveling, we were beat. It didn't help that as we were finishing up packing on Monday night / Tuesday morning I found out that we may need proof of plans to to leave Costa Rica, before we could board the plane to leave the United States. Thus I was buying return flight tickets around 2:30 am on Tuesday and had the alarm set for us to get up at 4:45 am. It was good that I got the return flight tickets, because we were asked for them in Fort Lauderdale.
Today Hannah and Silvia took the kids to check out various school options. I mostly worked on stuff like getting our Internet going, which really helped make it feel like everybody back home was a lot closer.
With the Internet set up and the kids having visited their potential schools, I saw one of my predictions come to pass: Last week I had a couple of people ask me if the kids had been learning Spanish. I told them that Julia has done some but the boys have done very little and that motivation wasn't real high; however, I suspected that their motivation would increase significantly in a week. And it has. The three oldest spent a few hours each on duolingo.com. All in all the kids have had surprisingly good attitudes, and I am very impressed with them.
The weather was nice today, a bit of rain around noon with a good temperature. Here's a picture from our front porch during the 30 minutes of rain we had.
I hadn't paid real close attention and thought that the roof was red ceramic tiles. As soon as the rain hit, I realized that the roof was metal sheeting made to look like ceramic tiles.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the day. It was nice because we--mostly Hannah--got everything unpacked.
Although there was that part about Hannah discovering her first cockroach. Bienvenidos a Costa Rica!
And then we landed.
Thank goodness we had connected with Silvia and Christian Rojas. A brother and sister who had lived in New Jersey for a number of years and speak English very well. They met us at the airport and picked up up to take us to our house, which we are renting from them.
We found out on Tuesday that they would both be coming and would have room for us and our stuff in their two cars (plus a few things we would by at WalMart before leaving San Jose. Finding out they would pick us up was a huge relief, because I had discovered late on Monday night that it was likely going to cost close to $3000 for the rental car we would have needed for the week. (I kept forgetting to get the rental car reserved and wasn't planning to pay so much for the car for one week.)
So Christian and Silvia were a huge help in getting from the airport to our place in Santiago de Puriscal. You can see where it is on the map below.
We had to buy lots of other stuff for the house and Silvia and Christian drove us around to get it. While doing so, I took this picture of Julia and Jonah drinking with a straw straight from a coconut. That was good stuff. Silvia is in the background to the right of Julia.
Last night after all the work of getting ready to go and traveling, we were beat. It didn't help that as we were finishing up packing on Monday night / Tuesday morning I found out that we may need proof of plans to to leave Costa Rica, before we could board the plane to leave the United States. Thus I was buying return flight tickets around 2:30 am on Tuesday and had the alarm set for us to get up at 4:45 am. It was good that I got the return flight tickets, because we were asked for them in Fort Lauderdale.
Today Hannah and Silvia took the kids to check out various school options. I mostly worked on stuff like getting our Internet going, which really helped make it feel like everybody back home was a lot closer.
With the Internet set up and the kids having visited their potential schools, I saw one of my predictions come to pass: Last week I had a couple of people ask me if the kids had been learning Spanish. I told them that Julia has done some but the boys have done very little and that motivation wasn't real high; however, I suspected that their motivation would increase significantly in a week. And it has. The three oldest spent a few hours each on duolingo.com. All in all the kids have had surprisingly good attitudes, and I am very impressed with them.
The weather was nice today, a bit of rain around noon with a good temperature. Here's a picture from our front porch during the 30 minutes of rain we had.
I hadn't paid real close attention and thought that the roof was red ceramic tiles. As soon as the rain hit, I realized that the roof was metal sheeting made to look like ceramic tiles.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the day. It was nice because we--mostly Hannah--got everything unpacked.
Although there was that part about Hannah discovering her first cockroach. Bienvenidos a Costa Rica!
School - Caleb
Today, I went to see the school I'm going to start going to on Tuesday, there aren't any people that will be in my class that speak English. There are a few good and a few bad things about that.
Good
I will definitely be the best student in our English class.
Without any English-speaking friends, it will probably make me want to learn Spanish faster.
Bad
I probably won't have any friends there because I won't be able to communicate with them.
No one will be there to tell me anything that the teacher is saying when we have breaks.
Good
I will definitely be the best student in our English class.
Without any English-speaking friends, it will probably make me want to learn Spanish faster.
Bad
I probably won't have any friends there because I won't be able to communicate with them.
No one will be there to tell me anything that the teacher is saying when we have breaks.
Traveling - Julia
So we got to our house yesterday and we finally got the wifi working, and I woke up about two hours ago around 12:30, so now I can actually post something.
So Tuesday morning we woke up at around 6 and went to the airport, and we were about an hour and a half early for our flight so there was a lot of sitting and waiting and being bored. We flew to Vegas (it took about an hour) then there was a half hour lay over before getting back on a plane to Florida (5 hours), then stayed in a hotel overnight. That day was very long and exhausting and painful because I'm almost positive my tailbone is broken an sitting down in chairs that were not very comfy was not fun.
We woke up the next morning around 5:30 and once again hauled all our luggage (there was a lot) 
to the airport, and we were about two hours early for our flight, then flew for three hours to Costa Rica. I was so relieved not to have to fly anymore.
Yesterday was probably the longest day of my life because right after we got off the plane we went shopping, and we shopped all day long, pretty much no breaks.
So today my brothers went and visited their school, an I'm about to go visit mine, and we dad keeps talking in Spanish then in English so he says everything twice and it's kind if annoying but still helpful. It also sound like there is an earthquake because its raining super hard, as it will for the rest of the winter (until about October). So, so far it's been pretty tiring, but I'm sure it will get better.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Pros and Cons of Moving to Another Country - Julia
I'm both excited and nervous to move to Costa Rica and have very mixed feelings. I think that overall it will be a great experience and I'll have a great time. Here are some pros and cons about moving.
Cons
- I will miss my friends and family a ton and might just die of homesickness
- I won't know what anyone is saying for a long time which will of course be extremely frustrating especially at school
- We have to wear uniforms at the school we go to. I've never had to before but I already hate them. A lot
- We can't take very much of our stuff at all, you can only fit so much into 6 suitcases, 6 carry-ons, and 6 backpacks
- We're not taking our doggy :( I will miss her lots and I won't be able to cuddle with her when I'm sad
Pros
- They have very delicious fruit there, and we are bringing our Blendtec--who doesn't love fruit smoothies
- The weather is absolutely perfect, 70's and 80's all year round, so we will be nice and warm while our friends back in Utah are freezing ;)
- The beach is one of my most favorite places to go and it will only be about 1/2 hour from where we live
- I'll be able to learn Spanish which is a very useful language to learn plus it'll just be cool to know a different language
Why Costa Rica? - Hannah
So here it goes. I've never blogged before. But this is the year because we want to remember our year in Costa Rica!!!
What brought this on, you may wonder? Well, several years ago Michael brought up the idea to me. He thought it would be fun for our family to have an international experience. He wasn't sure what I'd think of the idea, but I was definitely on board. It was just a dream at that point--Michael's job was the major concern.
Last year Michael talked with his employer, who was awesome to work with us. Because we should have a good internet connection, and we'll be in a similar time zone as the rest of Michael's co-workers, Michael will be able to work remotely. We know we're very fortunate in that respect. After getting the go-ahead, we went full speed on our plans.
We decided to pursue our country of choice--Costa Rica. So why Costa Rica? Here are our top 10 reasons, in no particular order.
Oh, and we leave in 10 days, but who's counting :)
What brought this on, you may wonder? Well, several years ago Michael brought up the idea to me. He thought it would be fun for our family to have an international experience. He wasn't sure what I'd think of the idea, but I was definitely on board. It was just a dream at that point--Michael's job was the major concern.
Last year Michael talked with his employer, who was awesome to work with us. Because we should have a good internet connection, and we'll be in a similar time zone as the rest of Michael's co-workers, Michael will be able to work remotely. We know we're very fortunate in that respect. After getting the go-ahead, we went full speed on our plans.
We decided to pursue our country of choice--Costa Rica. So why Costa Rica? Here are our top 10 reasons, in no particular order.
1. Weather
This last January in Utah was single-digit temperatures for most of the month. It was SO cold. In contrast, the weather where we'll be staying is in the 70s and 80s all year round. Ahhh....2. Safety
Costa Rica is sometimes referred to as "The Switzerland of Latin America" for its tendency to stay out of political conflicts. We didn't want to put our family in the middle of a drug war.3. Education
Costa Rica is one of the more literate countries in Latin America.4. Healthcare
According to the World Health Organization, Costa Rica's medical care system ranks higher than the United States. Costa Rica comes in at number 36, while the United States comes in at number 37. Our pediatrician, who travels to Costa Rica frequently, has assured me that you can get just about any service in Costa Rica that you can in the United States.5. Food and Water
Costa Rica has weekly farmers markets with mangoes, pineapples and bananas. I'm definitely bringing my Blendtec. Also, unlike many countries, the tap water is safe to drink.6. Environment
I've always wanted to see a rain forest. Sure, there will be bugs that come with that, but I'm excited to see monkeys, toucans, and sloths! Plus I've always loved the beach. We'll be about a half hour drive from the Pacific, and you can travel from the Pacific to the Caribbean coast in less than a day.7. Language
We wanted to be able to learn another language. Michael already speaks Spanish, so we won't be too out of our element. But the kids and I will do our best to learn. I have a long way to go. I can say "Hola."8. Poverty
After my list of benefits, this one may seem surprising. But as an underdeveloped country, Costa Rica is certainly not wealthy. I hope our family can learn several things from this. First, to be grateful for our own abundance. Second, that maybe it doesn't take lots of stuff to be happy; "Ticos" are known for being a happy people. And third, to provide service where we can.9. Cost of Living
We did not want to go in debt for this. We needed a place that we could afford, so Europe was out of the question.10. Church
We are excited to participate in our Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In Utah it is the predominant religion. In Costa Rica it is much more of a minority, and we will be in a small branch of about 50 people. I'm sure we'll have many opportunities to serve. It feels like a great opportunity to prepare our children for full-time missions.Oh, and we leave in 10 days, but who's counting :)
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