Costa Rican Chicos: Getting Settled & Our House

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.

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 :).