Costa Rica

It's a nice place to visit.  Also I might want to live there.

I'm in Costa Rica on business -- working with a number of software development contractors I've helped hire for my company.

I'm not naming names or agencies or numbers right now, but I can share the non-work stuff.

I heard October was usually quite rainy, but the two days I've been here it's been quite clear and beautiful.   70-75 all the time.

The work is in San Jose, the capital and largest city, which is in the middle of a country in a big valley between mountains and volcanoes.  here's the view from my hotel room:

 It's pretty far south (about 10° north latitude), so the days and nights are fairly equal.  It's on the east side of its time zone (Mountain time -- UTC-6 [during daylight savings, -7 otherwise]), so light is early -- 5am-5pm.  It felt weird to be light at 5am, and weird to be dark at 5pm!

It's also about 3700 feet above sea level, which i didn't notice until i tried to jog:

I'm not an amazing or fast jogger, but i think the extra 3000 feet got to me.  I knew something was wrong -- i thought maybe it was pollution or sickness or something, but it's a pretty clean place and I'm not sick, so it must have been the altitude!

The schedule is almost exclusively work, but we made the most of one morning and went up to Poás Volcano.

The drive up was super nice:

The volcano is active, so we had to wear helmets.  The ground had big divots in the concrete where burning stuff had been spit onto it, and the metal railings were occasionally bent from rocks it flung.  I am sure the helmet would have prevented any harm from coming to me from such hurtling, blazing debris.

It was very nice:

The drive back was nice too -- we stopped at a roadside and looked at this waterfall:

I also ate a Mamon Chino from a roadside stand (the alien eggs in the picture below).  Pretty good -- much like a lychee.  The strawberries that grow near the volcano are supposed to be good too, but I didn't have any of those.

Pura Vida!

Picture Highlights

My first two weeks in India were almost exclusively this:

Bleak urban squalor interrupted only by people in beautiful clothes and festively painted trucks -- they almost all look like this:

Fortunately I have some friends in the area who whisked me out of the city and showed me how less than an hour from the city there are beautiful places:

With nice places to walk:

And wildlife:

Go a little further and there are wonders - like the 4th largest banyan tree in the world (only a small part of it shown):

palaces:

and temples:

 and shrines:

And other kinds of animals:

Environs

The pervasive concrete and dust has proven to be less oppressive than I'd feared:

• The people, particularly women, wear beautiful, brilliantly-colored clothes
• If you get up high enough you'll see green, and in apartment complexes there's nice landscaping.

My building is in a sheltered enclave with pools and trees and gardens and grass.  Most nearby buildings are coated with balconies which the residents have decorated with numerous potted plants and festooned with climbing flowers -- the effect is I can look out of my room at an interesting urban garden:

I visited some friends and from their 11th story balcony you can look over the adjacent park and across the city -- pretty nice!

I hear that as recently 5 years ago Bangalore still lived up to its nickname, "the garden city," and that rules are in place ensuring that new construction allocates some amount of room for greenspace to work back toward that glory.

But even now there are creature comforts:

where I'm staying

My Atlanta-based company keeps an apartment for the many people traveling to Bangalore to see our India counterparts.

My quarters are large and comfortable - I have my own bathroom, and my room is spacious and high-ceilinged with a bed, some large cupboards, a desk, and a flat screen TV i haven't used.

There are 3 other such suites and a large, minimally furnished common area - i like it a lot.

There's wifi and running water (although I can't drink it), although showers are interesting:

The running water isn't heated.  To bathe I have a switch outside my bathroom to turn on a little overhead water heater.  I turn it on about 20 minutes before i shower.

It only holds a couple gallons of hot water, and most of that comes out the lower spigot instead of the shower head, but I have a large bucket and smaller pitcher, so the shower goes like this:

1. Turn on water, adjust to temperature
2. Put big bucket under spigot to catch 80% of the water and use the shower head to get mostly wet and warm.
3. Turn off water as the bucket is nearly full and the hot water is nearly gone.
4. Soap up.
5. Pour pitcher after pitcher of water from the bucket over your head to wash off the soap/shampoo.
6. When done there might be some more water heated up, so you can get about 30-60 seconds more shower in.

It's definitely not as luxurious as an American-style "stand there with hot water pounding on your back" type shower, but it has a simple pleasantness.  Cooling down when the water is off is interspersed with the pleasant wave of warm water you pour with deliberate slowness.  It's a briefer experience, but I at least am more conscious of it.

i'll be glad to have my normal shower back, but as inconvenient as the manual shower sounds, it's really not too bad.  I find the greater inconvenience trying to keep the water out of my eyes and mouth.

The Food!

Chances are good that if you're reading this you know I like Indian food.  I love it.  But I have a pretty narrow range of preferred foods.

That goes out the window here where I have limited control over my diet.  I can try articulating preferences but they're usually misunderstood, and so I've decided to take it as it comes.

More often than not, it's amazingly good.  The steward of the house where I'm staying has a reputation for good food but his two house boys are no slouches either.  Between them they've trotted out about 15 different dishes in 8 days -- each meal consisting of 2 varying curries, sweet corn soup (fantastic, and new to me), dhal curry, rice, and chapatti/roti (flat bread), and unflavored yogurt.  I eat some of everything eagerly with my hands.

Breakfast is a bit different - it has

• fruit (a rotation of papaya, mango, banana, and watermelon) which I'm not supposed to eat (bacterial risk), but i do anyway. 
• juice (i think they make it fresh) -- usually watermelon juice  (?!), but also grape (fresh-squeezed grape juice is very different), and a sort of lemonade.
• one of:
• a spicy omelette -- it's super delicious, and my favorite
• toast sandwich with spicy potato curry inside
• dhal curry (supposedly different than dinner, but seems the same to me).
• toast with the crust cut off (evidently my genteel dietary needs preceded me).
• coffee - thick, creamy with scalded milk, and heavily sugared

As much as I like Indian food, though, 8 days with spicy curries 3 meals a day is a little bit of a shock to the system.  I still eat and enjoy it, but i may need to get a pizza at some point soon just for a break.

Jet Lag

8 days into my trip my sleep schedule is still broken.  This should come as little surprise to those of you who know how eager I am to change even things so trivial as pen colors, parking spaces, the (one) meal I'll order at a given restaurant, or my seat at church.  My constancy is more than preference: it goes down to my bones.

I've slept 4-5 hours each night, always waking between 4 and 4:30, and never able to get back to sleep.  I don't nap during the day in the hopes that I'll be well and truly tired by night.  I am well and truly tired by about 2pm.

Hopefully the next few days should finally convince my body that it's worth changing.  I am tired.

Sunday

My first Sunday was an impressively social day (by my standards).  I met my dear friend Chrisheilman (also in India on business), and some friends of his for donuts and to see the hotel where a new church is starting.

Later that day I saw some old friends from my Texas days, Richey and Keli, who live in Bangalore now with their 4 children.  We had dinner and then attended a church service.

The service was well-attended, and the people (mostly Indians from the northeast of the country) were extremely friendly.  The service was in English, so I could understand and participate.  The sermon was heart-felt and theologically satisfactory but somewhat rambling.  The music was contemporary - with a guitar and several male and female singers.