Farmers Market Costa Rica Style

We have local farmers markets here every weekend, most local small town have the local farmers selling there home grown things, it is pretty interesting as you get some strange things for sale, they have every tropical fruit known to man kind. They have a giant bean pod called Manga, i always wanted to know how you did something with it, we bought one and Jenny told me to peel the pod and extract the beans, around the beans were a hairy skin, you put the bean in your mouth and suck the hairy skin off the bean, it was sweet and scented but it amounted to nothing more than a tiny little bit of flesh, useless. how about a giany red gooseberry thing, called Mamon Chino, translation is hilarious, Chinese sucker, it has a hairy thick peel that you have to remove and then you are left with a white flesh inner with a giant stone, it is very tasty but the flesh is full if strands that stuck in your teeth, nice to eat only now and again.





There are lots of funny little pumpkin type things that you boil as a vegetable. We don't bother with most of these but one larger one the Choyote, is nice, it looks like a pear but cooks like a potato and has an interesting flavour, now don't get me talking about potatoes as they are 6 times the price as lemons. onions are also expensive along with carrots, it is because they can only be grown on the higher slopes of the volcanoes here and that land is hghly prized but it makes the prices for these delicacies very expensive. Its a good thing that rice is the staple food here.




You see some very funny characters, these farmers are real hill billies and some days you get horses running about, they ride them like kids ride BMX, they make the horses go all crazy going sideways and backwards and prancing, all very dangerous, but that is the Costa Rican way, very dangerous.

Goddam Rain and Visas

Well i thought i knew how much rain this country could give out but man this last 10 days has been just shocking, it all started with a little hurricane near Puerto Rico, not to be confused with Costa Rica, well the hurricane was creating this huge circular weather pattern all around the Caribbean, this was forcing high speed air to pass over CR and drop its full load of rain here, it was unbelievable, it was raining non-stop day and night, just buckets, it was flooding all the pacific coast, washing away roads and bridges and houses and people, we even had a small bridge disappear here in my town of Santa Ana, it was making me miserable as we couldn't get out to do anything, it felt like being back in the UK again, plus at the same time, my wife has been getting new passports for herself and the little tinker, this itself was pretty easy but to allow her to travel properly they both need USA visas, this allows both transit through and holidays in the USA, getting these are getting progressively harder, the amount of paperwork required is silly, plus getting official paperwork here in CR is just crazy, you have to go to one government dept to get a birth certificate and then go to another to get it certificated to say it is real, isnt that just silly, so we had to provide house details, bank account details, car details, childs school details, recent holidays in the USA, recent transit details through the USA, it was silly, but i am looking at spending a year or so in my Spanish house as it will save us some money while we are waiting for house prices to fall. Now this is where the amount of paperwork gets incredible, we had to obtain a letter from the spanish embassy to allow the CR gov to give us the correct document, details if criminal record for my wife and child, bank account details, letter from the lawyer stating I am married and will support my wife in spain, details of my house in spain, my spanish ID number, my employment details, the little tinkers permit to leave the country, both Jenny and the tinker had to have medicals to prove they were healthy, and all these documents also had to be certificated at the relevant government dept, it has been ongoing solid for two weeks, non stop everyday, driving into San Jose after the rush hour, going to one office and then another. Pure madness, but i have to keep telling myself it will all be worth it, moving everything to spain seems a bit severe but i will save about $15,000 a year, which is a not inconsequential amount, plus we are looking at doing some major modernisation on the house, adding a third floor and a large walled garden, the third floor will be a master suit with walk in closet and on-suite bathroom, I am also looking at adding solar powered hot water system and solar powered central heating for the winters, which are cooler than what you think for somwhere so far south, it is only 150 Km from north africa, my first year in Malaga there was a snow storm that swept through spain and onto Morocco where it killed 300 folks.
Also I am looking at getting my little tinker British Citizenship, it is a tricky thing from here but as we are only 10 minutes from the British Consulate and I am known to the Vice-consul, there are only 400 brits registered at the Consulate. Again it requirtes loads of paperwork, which all has to be translated by an official translater at $20 a sheet,

Man i am going crazy with all this paperwork, life will improve i am sure.

The Tex Mex Restaurant Night Out

Saturday night we decided to got to the local Mexican restaurant that have not eaten at yet, we tried a week before only to find out it had just changed hands and was closed for "modernisation", You have to be a bit skeptical of comments like that. we went back and found a really rustic style place with all open air, as most places are here in the tropics, and a really old place and no modernisation. most bars and restaurants here are not much more than a tin roofed barn style building with varying amounts of decoration. this was the same but at least it was full, I was expecting a full Mexican menu but it was a scam, it was offering typical Costa Rican food and the main meals were very expensive , more so than the expensive Peruvian place we went to last week, so we ended up with the large plate of deep fried things, as one does, chicken wings and sausages and bananas, plus a few more things, a dish of shredded beef in sauce that i swear that tasted more like Curry than the local dish, but it was OK with the corn chips and other goodies, there was a huge monster of a TV screen showing a local dance competition, with a slight angle, the couples dancing were doing it to make money for something or someone, I couldn't make out, one couple were dancing for there child who had both legs removed below the knee, and one couple the guy only had one leg at all, not even the ass cheek, but I can tell you tat guy could swivel on his stick like you cannot believe, i was amazed at this spectacle, I think only in the third world would they have it like this, but i am not poking fun at them just shock and amazement. We ate and the little girl found a playmate in the new owners daughter who was the same age, they ate icecream and watched cartoons in the main room, we drank and ate until we were full. It was an interesting evening and one i will probably do again

The Agony and Ecstacy

This is the peak of the rainy season but it is also the mid term school holiday. So we decided to go to a beach hotel, the closest to us is on the pacific coast and the place is a surfing mecca, so i wasn't to keen to go but it is close and the road is OK, so we set off and it rained constantly and the traffic was slow and we set off late and i hate driving in the dark here, can be dangerous. So we arrive at about 6pm and found the hotel completely empty, the hotel was OK and the room was big and a nice bathroom which is uncommon for the cheap hotels i normally use. We went out for dinner that night and found this little town just a small collection of houses in a small swampy flat area, the road to the restaurant was alive with frogs and toads hopping around the roads. we could identify 5 different frog calls amongst them, just croaking heaven plus a few fireflies. It rained like heaven had opened all night long and the next morning i had expected a miserable grey sky but it was a blue and warm and very nice, I took and early morning walk around the gardens and found a tiny owl, called a pygmy owl sat looking at me as i wandered about the waterlogged gardens. we played all day in the wonderful jacuzzi and swimming pool, and thinking i had developed some sort of immunity to sunburn i refused to put on cream, i spent a good deal of time in the shade but i spent hours in the pool with Emma throwing her around as she is getting very confident in the water.



The day was fantastic and sunny all day long and we went for a walk to the beach and found absolutely no holiday makers at all, it was really outside of the real resort area, it shows how small the resort industry is in Costa Rica, we had to walk along a dirt road to get to the beach and there were ruins of buildings that had gone bankrupt along the beach. But there were bird filled marshy areas and some very large trees which had 5 pairs of Scarlet Macaws feeding in during the day,



It was fantastic to see these huge birds, far bigger than the common Turkey Vulture, but they were making the most incredible din, whenever a vulture came near it reached a fantastic climax and was directly above a poor house, i couldn't live with that noise, it makes me wonder why anyone would ever think of having a parrot not even a Macaw as a pet, they are insane or deaf.

I felt a little burnt from the sun when i went to bed and i was showing some red skin, when i got up the next morning i was looking like a lobster, i was scarlet from head to toe,and my skin was delicate and painful, I had refused sun block as i thought i was tan enough from my time in Australia, but i was mistaken and i have to be reminded from time to time that i am a white boy from the land of rain and i need to keep out of the sun or get on the sun block.

Holiday in the UK for Christmas

I am planning to have my Christmas in the UK for the first time in Gawd knows how many years, I am not sure what has prompted me to think about the UK for my holidays as I normally like to go to sunny climes, but after not getting back for about a year and perhaps even missing the Christmas spirit as Costa Rica the Christmas thing is both too spirtual and too hot and too over-commercial, as the shops are open christmas day and boxing day and basically not closed as they need to keep making money, Last year i actually had some gardeners cleaning out my garden and putting in a patio on Christmas day, I was eating Turkey while watching 2 guys digging out my patio 8 feet away, so this year I am going "Home" and staying with my big sister and kicking the nephew out of his double bed and taking over the house for 3 weeks. I am looking forward to cold weather as i am now claiming my jetlag is being made worse by not feeling cold at night, It is 2 weeks since i got back home to Costa Rica and it is never cold and the place I am living in right now is hotter than the last house as it has a flat roof and can get very warm at night, we are going to move house sometime soon maybe early next year as i am tied in to a 12 month contract, so who knows where i may end up, I will have to take note of all options, Jobs, cost of heating-cooling, nice beaches, I have a house in Spain that i haven't lived in for 6 years and is only used by my sister for holidays so i may take a year in Spain, it is fully furnished and ready to roll, so that would be an easy option.

Plus it has been incredibly rainy here, it rained solidly all day last wednesday to the point it flooded a local neighbourhood to bout 4 feet deep and this is when we have a river gorge of over 100 feet locally,




I went out for a meal on friday night to a Peruvian restaurant and i was laughing as when we got inside it was built over the local small river, and you could hardly hear yourself speak with the rushing noise of the water. plus it was damned expensive so I will not be going back there again. So if i want a pause from the rain perhaps spain is a good option as it is on the edge of becoming part of the sahara desert, but i will need A/C for the summer couple of months.