My morning ritual starts with reading any email I may receive, then I take a look at Inside Costa Rica and AM Costa Rica. Most days it’s a rather futile search for real news about Costa Rica, but there are just enough tidbits now and again to keep me coming back. In the process of
[continue reading...]

What do those two things have in common? Well, other than being in the title, nothing really. Let’s start with gunfire and things that sound like gunfire. ‘Tis the season here, as ’tis throughout Christendom. The Ticos love this time of year for reasons both sacred and profane. The sacred is self-evident. The profane would
[continue reading...]

San Jose is not Disneyworld. Now, you can take that a lot of different ways. We don’t have (a lot of) people dressed up like cartoon animals, for example. We don’t have rides, we have casinos. After you’ve seen the gold museum (yawn) and the jade museum (ditto) there’s really not a lot left. And
[continue reading...]

It’s Thanksgiving Day as I write this, so I’ll start by giving thanks. I am thankful for the weather here. It may rain too much sometimes, the wind may howl and require me to put on a sweatshirt once in a while, it may get so warm I perspire even with the fan on once
[continue reading...]

For those who follow such things, ‘Pensionado’ is one of the residency statii (statuses?) a gringo such as myself can have. Currently I am ‘rentista’ which means I put a big chunk of my net worth in Banco Nacional in order to prove I wouldn’t end up begging on the streets like some of the
[continue reading...]

It’s been a wet year, and the recent set of storms delivered the coup de grace, leaving death and devastation in its wake. I had the misfortune to have been involved in a flood a little over 10 years ago, and was forced to stay in a shelter (a nice one due to the fact
[continue reading...]