Home, Sweet Home (San Jose, Costa Rica)

We are now one step up from homeless… we live on a street with no name. That is typical for this area, maybe even for Central America in general. Our official address, the street address I gave the cable company for installation, is “150 meters sur oeste del parque Los Sauces, edificio 309, apartamento 4” (150 meters southwest of Los Sauces Park, building 309, apartment 4). Please don’t send anything to that address: the box is very small and we probably won’t get it!

Speaking of housing, we did not expect the fortified housing we have seen. EVERY house has iron fences around their small front yards, and either iron gates to enclose their cars or mechanized solid walls that open for the cars. Our four-plex has a block wall, pointed iron bars, an iron gate, and razor wire over it all; I think our apartment is safe when we leave for the day!

Our Big Brother and Sister (Brian and Amanda) met us at the airport with Fernando and a van for our two trunks, two suitcases, and two backpacks: everything we own except for what we left in storage in Las Vegas. We got to our apartment with no problem. Brian and Amanda gave us a good walking tour of the area and we saw where the Spanish Language Institute (Instituto de Lengua Española) is (about a 10-minute walk). We stopped at a local place for lunch and realized it will take some time to get used to the money system here: lunch for 4 was 21,925 colones!

As it turns out, our apartment is on the bus route that circles our part of San Jose, which is not even on most tourist maps! Depending on the bus driver, the closest stop to our gate is about 10 feet or 200 yards! The closest major store is a Hiper Mas, similar to a super Wal-Mart, about 15-20 minutes by bus. It is so much like a Wal-Mart the employee badges have Wal-Mart printed on the top of the backside! One thing we found odd was that there were 1 or 2 vendor reps on every aisle helping customers choose the correct (their) brand! We’re not sure if that was because of the weekend, or if they will be there during the week as well.

The couple next door to us in our four-plex is attending the language school, also. They will be working in-country when they finish the course.

Saturday afternoon we found a nice church, spoke to some people that were making preparations, and decided to try it out Sunday morning. Although it was all in Spanish, we found we could follow most of the praise songs and the guest speaker used PowerPoint slides, so we could follow that, also. They emphasize small groups and we have a list to choose from.

Something we did not anticipate was how much we would have to buy once we moved into a furnished apartment: silverware, pots’n’pans, cleaning supplies, etc. The hard part is buying things we know we won’t be able to keep when we leave.

NONETHELESS, we are excited to be here, we are eager to start classes, and we look forward to what God has in store for us!