I am Going to Live on the Beach and Then Folks Will Come

I have had a complete change of attitude to living in the south of the country since I last wrote about living in the country, one main reason was the fact that I could buy a house for $14,000 and it was a house built for the American fruit company so the houses are designed like an American house of the 60’s , huge and very high quality and right next door to the Airport. The American fruit company set up in the south of Costa Rica during the late 40’s, the built a huge banana plantation and with it the whole infrastructure, steam railways to the nearest big port and that was Golfito, also all the housing for the American managers and schools and clubhouses and gold courses, this was all very nice for about 40 years until the unionisation of the workers, they thought they could force the company to pay lots of money for wages and other things, so they did what any self respecting company would do, they just shut shop and closed everything down putting thousands of folks out of work and the banana plantations to this day are abandoned and nothing at all is functioning and the housing has not had much in the way of attention but the quality is fantastic and the houses are in a really nice condo style with an old clubhouse that is empty, it is only 20 minutes from some fantastic beaches, and 5 minutes from the local Airport which I can use to get to the Capitol, San Jose. We have a local school only 400 yards away and a small town about 15 minutes away where my sister in law lives. Why am I really wanting to move, well basically it means I can just start living a more outdoor life and near the beach and start riding my bike more, here in San Jose it is easy to get killed by a truck and they even have bike jacking, yes I did say that bike jacking. You can be riding along and suddenly a jeep can pull along side and an armed man tells you to get off and then steals your bike, sometimes shooting you for fun, so I tend not to ride here as it is so goddam busy on the roads. So I can ride my bike to the beaches, learn to surf and build an outdoor barbecue area and spend more time outside rather than inside, here it is just like being in the UK, it rains a lot and I drive everywhere, this is not what I wanted, so I am going to see if I can sleep in the tropical areas and if necessary I will get A/C for the bedroom. Jenny has a university colleague who lives in one of the America condo houses and says he pays $120 a month rent, and there are many of the houses for sale as there are basically no jobs anymore there. So I can pick up a house for next to nothing and we’ll see where it goes from there.