Welcome to the pura vida

I am officially in Costa Rica.  I would say I have officially moved to CR, but I’m not sure that’s quite right, since I arrived with two bags and am staying at a hotel.

But I’m here, and enjoying it.

San Jose has a surprisingly nice airport, but they could use a few more immigration lines.  I’m used to locals speeding through while foreigners wait; that was mostly true here, but the difference was that a minimum of 2/3 of everyone deplaning was foreign.  There were two 20-min queues in the foreign lines, and the local lines sat idle a good bit of the time.  Apparently I have company here.

I heard my first “pura vida” as I hopped in the shuttle to get my rent car.

First mission: get a rent car.  Hertz here is basically what I imagined: a small building with friendly, slow-moving staff.  They had a dot-matrix printer.  Hearing it screech across the page brought back memories of childhood and dial-up modems.  I lost myself reminiscing for another 20 min or so while they fixed me up with a car.  I am the proud driver of a Toyota Yaris with 88,000 km and an engine that vibrates constantly, sometimes in a nice massaging manner and sometimes in a threatening I-will-fall-out-the-bottom manner.  It has no power nothing, including no engine power.

My car has two other things missing that are small, but make a huge difference: a convex mirror and a chime when the keys are in the ignition.  If you ever thought that “objects in mirror” note is annoying, try not having a convex mirror.  Mack trucks fit in my blind spot.  Also, if my keys are in the ignition and I open the door, nothing buzzes at me.  If you know me and my legendary absentmindedness then you are probably making bets now on how long it will take before I lock myself out of my car.  The odd thing is that the lights have that “soft dim” feature where they fade out instead of clicking off.  Quite a nice touch for a car that almost dares you to lock your keys inside.

It was now 2pm, so I headed to the office.  First, a bit about driving here.  Hertz charges $12/day for GPS in addition to ~$60/day for the car.  It really should be the other way around.  Your car is useless unless
a) You pick up a Tico tour guide
b) Your idea of a good vacation is wandering lost
c) You get a GPS
There are very few road names here.  Seriously.  Zoom in on Google Maps and you’ll see lots of completely unnamed roads.  Even if it has a name, you are never going to find it on a sign.  Half of my drive to work is on “Road.”

GPS is not perfect, however, as I discovered when it led me to what was obviously not my office.  Fortunately we have a relatively large facility there, so I stopped and asked someone for directions and, after a bit of stretching my Spanish and some gesturing, I made it.  I am still inordinately proud of that.

View from my hotel in Lindora

Part of the reason I am proud of making it to the office is that I didn’t hit anything on the way.  I’ve ridden around in Central America (Honduras) before, but I’ve never been the driver until now.  It’s not nearly as bad as non-South African Africa, but not as orderly as South Africa.  People are surprisingly courteous, though.  Another reason to get GPS: it’s very hard to tell what is a one-way street and what is not.

To finish day 1, I took a walk near my hotel.  There is a strip of nice offices and restaurants nearby, and the weather in the evenings (and all day, actually) is great.  I had some Peruvian food and then stopped at a grocery store to take a peek.  I paused at the diaper, fem care, adult incontinence, and toilet paper aisles.  If you are creeped out right now, you clearly don’t know what I do for a living.

When your company asks to pay you to move to a destination known as a great vacation spot, that's a good sign, right?

I am about to move to Costa Rica, which is good news for anyone who may get lost traversing the world wide web and end up on this blog on occasion.  You might even hear snippets of my last 18 months, which included weddings in India and China, 4 months working in China, a quick vacation over in the UK, and a good bit of culture shock back in the U.S.