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!