A shopping triumph

OK, I have to admit that I am very excited about our new bathroom faucet.

Russ is holding the old one for comparison. Not only is the new one sleek, modern and shiny, it actually shuts off easily and we don't bump our knuckles on the wall using it. It's also longer, so that it's much easier to wash one's hands in the tiny sink in our guest bath. Through the last 9 years, guests have kindly not mentioned the inadequacies of the old faucet. Not to mention that only cold water comes to this sink.
  It took us 9 years to fix this problem because this is the very first faucet we found that would fit our needs. It's a good example of why I find shopping much more interesting in Monteverde. In Wisconsin, if you want something you go to a store or two and buy it. Ho-hum; it's a chore. Or maybe you go on line and a day or two later it's at your door. Where's the challenge? When we do eventually find what we want here, it really makes us very happy.
   Here there are often strange shortages of things—when we first moved into our house we couldn't find coffee cups anywhere in town for a few weeks. Recently there was the desk lamp crisis and we've just spent 4 months trying to get a replacement part of our hot water tank. (It just came into the hardware store. Hooray!)  Many people that live here shop in bigger towns or San Jose where there is more demand for luxury goods like a faucet that cost more than some ticos make in a day (about $20). We are just too plain lazy and too content here to go elsewhere to shop. Not to mention that it might take all the fun out of finding a faucet.

The adventure of the ladder

Living in another country and trying to figure out how to get things done can be confusing or frustrating at times. One of my rules of thumb for living in Costa Rica is:

The things you think will be easy are hard and the things that you think will be hard are easy.

Here's an example from this week. Our house is varnished wood. The varnish looks pretty when new but requires a lot of maintenance. Every 3 years it gets so black and moldy we want to get it redone. Finding someone to sand it down and revarnish it wasn't hard this time and the part that is done looks great.

Here is the hard part. Our contractor, who just finished building a huge fancy restaurant downtown, doesn't own a ladder. (He just builds scaffolding when he has to get up high but we don't have lumber just laying around.) Our little wooden ladder that a friend built for us isn't long enough to reach the back of our house which is up on pillars because the lot slopes. Good ladders are very expensive here—perhaps double what a similar ladder would be in the States. So after various calls I located a friend with a long ladder who is willing to lend it to us. Whoops, the contractor only has a motorcycle and the friend's house is pretty far away. He suggested that we go and get it. We don't have a car.

Here comes the easy part. I call one of our favorite taxi drivers, Fabio, who drives us there and gets up on the baking hot roof to tie it on.

He spends lots of extra time on the hot roof because he insists on not cutting our long and inexpensive  rope because it would be a shame to waste it. Then drives us home and charges us what he would charge if he just took us to our friend's house.

Birding note: on the way there we saw a Black-breasted Wood Quail fly across the road. They prefer to walk or run, so it was surprising to see one airborne. Fabio backed up try to see it or the rest of the covey but no luck. Sorry, but I don't have a photo of it.

Good morning!

Morning--time for a good cup of Costa Rican coffee. Yum. I've been making cafe con leche by heating milk and sugar in the microwave, then sitting the filter on top of the measuring cup and pouring in the water to make the coffee. Not only is it delicious, but also the way the coffee and milk are in layers before I stir really perks me up because it's so pretty and subtle. Enough to make me like the color tan. That in itself is an eye-opener.









Right now I have these beautiful gerbera daisies. There is one store in town that sells flowers on Thursday and Friday. For years I didn't know that, until one day I walked by on a Thursday. It's a difficult decision which flowers to squander $5 or so on--huge clumps of tropical flowers, or something like these daisies. The stems were about 2 feet long!










And meanwhile, this is what is going on outside. We are having our roof painted. It will be green this time. Last time I picked blue and it was pretty, but really, how much time do we spend looking at our roof? It's only visible from a couple of places. So this time we went for the cheapest color. One can also get red.

Notice the clouds and imagine them moving. Clouds almost never sit still around here, thanks to the trade winds.