Costa Rica 1

We have been settling in the last couple of months. Turrialba is a city in the central valley of Costa Rica, about 2-3 hours from San Jose, depending on traffic, and sort of in the mountains/volcano ranges of Costa Rica, but not terribly high up. It's warm and sunny and tropical, but also rains reasonably often (even though this is technically the dry season). The area is somewhat rural and agricultural, and the campus at CATIE is a bit isolated from the city itself, so it's quiet and green but also not terribly far from more urban things.

Here are some pictures from campus (the main campus building and some views).

And the tunnel that goes under the road between our house and the kids' school.

This is the building where I work.

And the nearest small town where there's a lady who sells ice cream in little baggies, ever-changing flavors.

We have evolved from force-marching the kids one hour each way to the grocery store on foot, with all of us carrying backpacks of food home, to learning how to use the buses and usually sending Mike to the store now that I'm at work and kids are at school more.

The first month or so that we were here was essentially summer vacation, so we did a lot of reading books, playing cards, kicking a soccer ball, and walking to the library on campus. Campus was mostly closed down for vacation when we first arrived, then over time the facilities started opening up more (cafeteria, library, gift shop, etc.). And since early February kids have been enrolled at the elementary school on campus, and since later February there have been study abroad groups visiting and also now new groups of masters' students on campus, so things have woken up more.

(this is the kids' school)

(and a picture of all four kids going there on the first day (uniforms are on back-order from the supplier, so they get to wear normal clothes for now))

So far so good, I think. They are learning some Spanish, bit by bit, adjusting to a new place and norms (dress codes, different levels of formality, coming home for lunch) and a new style of school (school food options if they don't come home, comparatively more technology (of course) compared to Waldorf). The school does a lot of English teaching too so the kids have found people who they can talk to more easily as well (slower for immersion purposes, but a softer landing and an ability to feel more integrated, so that's been nice). 

We went through a period of having to do a bunch of stuff-acquisition -- between basics for the house we're in (which had furniture but no sheets, pillows, pots, pans, toilet paper, etc.), basics for day-to-day (phone, internet, electric service, lawn mowing) and long long long (did I mention long?) lists of school supplies -- which took hours and hours and days and days to figure out what everything was and where to buy it and how to carry it home, etc.

And so now we're in more of maintenance mode, which is definitely a nice change. Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Mike came during the period of heavy school-supply-hunting and mostly they stayed around campus (visiting the botanical garden, going to the cafeteria, eating ice cream), but we also took a couple of days and went with them to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica to the beach (about 3 hours from here) (I didn't do a good job taking many pictures, though).

We also accompanied them back to San Jose to catch their flight back to the U.S., and I took advantage to go to one day of a folkdance camp (I again didn't take many pictures, but here are some from the road).

Meanwhile, Oren turned 8 in February, and we celebrated with a sloth-shaped "cake."






The stuffed animals also created a birthday marketplace where all the humans could buy sandwiches, desserts, books, and drawings with each stuffed animal manning a different stand.

And friends of the kids (who are also American and here because their dad is in school, but who are homeschooled and were therefore really excited to meet other kinds who speak English, but who are actually going back to the U.S. in the next few weeks) came over too.


Eytan also celebrated a half-birthday (11 1/2) with half a cake.

Meanwhile, we have met a few neighbors too. CATIE has a pretty big campus a few miles outside of Turrialba -- with housing for people who want to live on campus.  So one of our neighbors is my primary work contact, originally from Panama (but who lived in Peru for many years working for an institution closely associated with the ones I worked with way back when), another is a friend from Eytan's class, and two other households nearby have smaller kids who we have played with at the playground. One of those families (from Dominican Republic and Nicaragua) invited us over for a barbecue the other night when their sister was visiting, and they have a trampoline, so all the kids were super excited. So there are other people living on campus who are transplants too.

Sugar cane harvest season has started here, so there are trucks carrying the cut sugar cane to processors all over. I got one picture below, of a truck heading to processor, but not a great one. I'll keep trying for a better photo.

So, two months in, six months to go. I think we're somewhat adjusted. Mike met a family on the bus, oddly enough, who were from Minnesota (and actually from the town where he is from, so they knew people in common). This is unusual in that while Costa Rica is a very popular destination for American travelers, Turrialba is pretty far off the beaten track for tourism (apparently unless you do whitewater rafting). Anyway, they are traveling around Latin America for a year with 4 kids younger than ours, which made me think about what it would have been like if we had actually been able to come in 2020 as planned (i.e. the kids would have been 3, 5, 7, and almost 9 then; instead of 6, 8, almost 10, and 11.5 as they are now). While work-wise I would probably have rather come in 2020 and stay the full year we had planned, it's probably easier and more interesting for us and for the kids now that they are a little older, and I definitely prefer this mode of travel (staying put in one place) to the kind of traveling where you move frequently from place to place, and where the work becomes always figuring out where to stay, how to get to the next place, how to feed everyone, etc.

So in that vein of introspection, here's the pro and con list so far:

Pros:

1. Year-round growing season: When we buy fruits and veggies from the market, we can take their seeds and put them in the ground and water them and they grow, even though it's February.  So far we have some watermelon plants and bean plants and cilantro plants that are doing pretty well.

2. Kid autonomy re: movement: There are lots of internal roads at CATIE where there are some cars but not tons. And it's a big campus but also not too big, so it means the kids (especially the oldest two) can go out on their own much more than they can at home. We've found a bike so Eytan can go riding wherever, and Li'el can walk over to the other side of campus to friends, and Oren doesn't range as far yet but can still walk to and from school on his own to come back for lunch if he wants to. We're working on finding some more bikes to expand that reach a bit more.

3. Kid autonomy in other departments: Oren accidentally developed a side business his first week or two of school, where he was making paper airplanes that you can send flying with a rubber band, and a couple of kids in his class started putting in orders for them and paying him like ten cents for them, which quickly enough became a source of income used to buy lollipops from the school snack cart. It seems to have slowed down now, but it was a funny start to the school year.

4. New cultural experiences: We have been to Costa Rica before, with my work, but only for short spurts of time, and even having been around Latin America in various spots before, there are certain experiences that are definitely new (mostly the kid related ones) -- things like going to parent meetings at the school, and finding out that each class has elections for student government (even the preschoolers). Eytan was elected secretary of his class (by one vote in a runoff election), even though he's probably not capable of taking notes in Spanish -- but I don't even really know if that job includes any note-taking anyway. Oren was elected as "first alternate" or "vocal uno" which means that if the president or vice-president of his class is absent he fills in for them. Doing what? I don't know. But he was very excited that he won because no one else ran for that position. We're just going with it.

Cons:

1. Extra responsibility: I didn't really think at first about how being the one in our family with language skills and more of this kind of travel experience meant that more of the responsibilities that we might normally share (navigating kids' school, helping visitors get places, figuring out the school supply lists, being in a new workplace, etc.) ended up falling more to me, and so for a while I felt like I had 3 or 4 full time jobs all at once. But with having entered more into maintenance mode now, and everyone else acclimating more, that has definitely gotten chiller.

2. Formalities: Culturally, things just feel more formal here than in the U.S., or formal in different ways, both in terms of language and in terms of practices... and being from somewhere else, the norms are just not ones that I know naturally. And while I've lived other places before, in those instances I was for the most part able to operate within less formal niches, or be more just an observer, even in relatively formal cultures. Here I can't get out of navigating things like a relatively official workplace and parent responsibilities (documents for school, p's and q's of uniform requirements for kids (which are VERY specific), campus politics, intricacies of visas and paperwork for 6, etc.).  While I'm relatively culturally pliable, it's the kind of stuff that you encounter that makes you feel more notably American (a national law that all school kids have to wear completely black shoes, memos in super flowery language (compared to English) that all kids need to wear pink, red, or white on Valentine's day and bring in a "detallito" to give to a classmate (and figuring out what that means, because the literal translation of the word doesn't give you the cultural context to know what they're talking about, etc. etc.)).

But, I'll say it again, so far so good. Glad to be here, and everyone is doing well with it all. Meanwhile, we have also been learning how to use new (to us but not to most other people) things like a smartphone (which we still use pretty minimally, but...), because pretty much all communication here happens via WhatsApp. So in that spirit, I'm leaving you with a cute photo of all of us trying to smush into the screen to talk to Unc.