April showers bring May power

I was in Panama last week, where there is a serious power crisis.  This is because the majority of the country's power is hydroelectric, but the rainy season has started later than usual in Panama and the water reserves are getting low.

Last week traffic was messier than usual because the government changed its office hours, meaning people were commuting at different times.  Friday the my company's country manager declared that anyone could work from home if they were equipped to do so, and that they would run the air conditioner in the office only sparingly.  Result: at 11am it was 79F in the office.  Fortunately they relented later and turned the A/C on to let things cool down before they shut it off again.

From a travel update through American Express:

Government officials ordered three of Panama's largest hydroelectric plants to close May 12 to save energy. The plants will remain closed until further notice. Electricity is being provided to the country through thermal power plants and smaller hydroelectric plants.

Obligatory energy-saving practices are still in effect, including the following:

• Supermarkets, casinos, bars, nightclubs, and theaters must close 2200-0600 daily
• Government offices continue to operate on a limited schedule (0730-1330)
• Air conditioning in government offices and commercial facilities must be turned off 1100-1500 daily
• Public and private schools are open, but must not use air conditioning or non-essential lights
• Private businesses must not use air conditioning between 0800 and 1600
• All electronic store signs may only be turned on 1800-2200
• Businesses with private energy sources such as fuel-powered generators can continue to use appliances at will

Sharing the road… or hogging it all

I have enjoyed driving in Costa Rica. I have mentioned before how it has opened up some aspects of the way people live to me, but it is also just fun because it is continual active driving.

I have a theory that on one hand Costa Ricans (or Latin American drivers generally?) certain don’t know or disregard some norms of the road (fast traffic on the left, for example). However, because everyone is ignoring norms and because there are lots of potholes, etc., they are all more careful/defensive drivers than the typical U.S. driver. This is certainly true for me: in some ways when I’m driving in the U.S. I assume the other person will behave themselves, and someday I will probably pay for that assumption.

Add the fact that I’m driving a standard here, which I enjoy, and driving is a sport instead of a chore. You can still feel like a rally driver while heading down a road at 30 mph if you’re slaloming around potholes, randomly-stopping buses, and weaving motorcycles and also actively working the gears so that the caged hamsters can get you up and down the hills.

Here in Costa Rica you’re also dodging bicyclists and 4-wheelers that people take on the freeways. In Nicaragua you have to watch out for the horse carts.

There are also a lot of painfully slow drivers. There may be all sorts of reasons, but a Tico added this one: many people either take a rental care to their car inspection or probably bribe the inspector, so there are a lot of cars that simply can’t perform well enough to do anything more than crawl up hills.

But sometimes driving in CR can be a different experience in a different way, when you take over the whole road. While coming back from the coast (read: beach) one weekend I stopped to pay a toll. Kids were playing soccer on the other side just past the tollbooth, which I thought was a pretty gutsy move to jump in/out of the street when someone comes up to pay a toll.


Like a racing videogame.  Except that I'm driving a Toyota Yaris. 

After that someone pulled into the left lane to pass me on the undivided, 2-lane highway (and, by the way, this is one of their major national arteries) but then just hung there. The longer he sat there the more nervous I became. But then I saw others in the left lane, and then I watched as people stayed in the left… even when the two lanes became divided by a concrete barrier. I realized that they had redirected the entire freeway in one direction toward San Jose, so I spent a good bit of the rest of the trip driving on the wrong side of the road.

This clearly isn’t a fluke, because the road is designed for this: I noticed that the tollbooths have signage both ways, and there are “lane ends/yield” signs on the left side of the road where they are clearly marking lanes ending only if you are driving against traffic.

PS: I wish they had mobile credit card readers here like they do in South Africa. That would make me a lot more comfortable sometimes.

The multi-tiered expat life

I have discussed my surprise at the different set of expats I’ve met here. After being here a while longer, I have seen a bit more nuance.

First of all, everywhere I’ve gone there have been a couple types of expats, and what I really mean is people from outside the region. (Yes, Cameroonians in Nigeria are expats, but already have a lot more cultural similarities.) I have always met some younger folks living paycheck to paycheck usually living there as a short-term adventure. There is always the “core” group of businessmen. Then there is the small sliver who have made a permanent home somewhere.  

Here there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of Americans or others who are making it by the skin of their teeth. The difference is that frequently it isn’t a short-term thing, like it is in other countries (the 20-something with his guitar bumming around until the money runs out and he returns to the U.S.).  I met a guy who had just moved down and was looking for work and I had given him my phone number in case he needed something. He gave me a call a month later and just chatted, but the gist was that his housing situation (where he could live free in exchange for maintaining the grounds) had taken a turn for the worse, and that things were tight. He didn’t ask for anything so I didn’t offer, but I’m pretty sure he was essentially fishing for some help.  I met one late-20’s American single mom who moved down here with her kid expecting to get a job and stay here, and only after that realized it would be difficult to get employment because she needed a visa.

There are a shocking number of older (65+) Americans who are living here, and a decent number that I've met are in tight situations.

View from the Volcan Poas hillside into the valley; San Jose is in the distance on the right.


There is also a good section of people who came down with good jobs, then left the good job when it would have rotated them elsewhere and just decided to scale back in order to live here.

Finally, there are expats who have decent, live-anywhere jobs. I’ve met people who run call centers, lots of people in IT who are working remotely, and several people working on/off jobs (e.g. a guy who operates ship engine rooms and does 1 month on in Singapore, 1 month off at home in CR).

I am opposed to filibustering

No, I am not going to discuss American politics, I am going to talk about a Costa Rican holiday and their biggest national hero.

Recently we celebrated Juan Santamaría’s birthday.  Juan a drummer boy who was killed trying to set on fire a house where some troops under an American filibusterer named William Walker were holed up.

In case you’re trying to remember when we fought the Costa Ricans, the U.S. government never did.  What might resolve this puzzle is that a “filibusterer” is a term for someone who fought a proxy war.

 Not our best ambassador ever.

Walker thoroughly believed in America’s Manifest Destiny and also wanted to create new slave states in the pre-Civil War U.S. He invaded Mexico, captured a town, and was eventually driven out by the Mexicans and I’m sure the U.S. diplomat sincerely apologized to Mexico for our rogue nutcase.  He then gathered an army and invaded Nicaragua, at one point essentially ruling it.  After he was driven out by the combined forces of some of the neighbors, he regrouped for another try.  This time the U.S. Navy forcibly returned him to the U.S. when the caught him at sea.  He made one final expedition at the behest of some British colonists in Central America, but the British regional authorities saw his presence differently.  They caught him and, since we Americans clearly weren’t doing a good job keeping him at bay, they turned him over to the Hondurans who had no trouble executing him.

My Spanglish

Some notes on living in the Spanish-speaking country.

Because I’m getting new rent cars every time I travel, I end up with different radio stations I listen to, because sometimes I’ve been too lazy to re-find the ones I previously liked.  My favorites thus far have been a station that plays only love songs, a station that has political round-table discussions in the mornings, a radio station that plays Christian praise music, and one that has preaching on most of the time.

The Christian music and love song stations I like because I have an idea of the context already, and thus it’s easier for me to figure out what they are saying.  Side note: I found the Christian station because I was surfing the stations and, after stopping on this one for 10 seconds, I realized the music was so simple musically and the lyrics were pretty repetitive that it had to be Christian praise music, since no regular song would get airplay if it were that bad.  Unfortunately, I was correct.

The preaching I like because it typically consists of one person speaking for a long time, with dramatic pauses for emphasis which allow me to catch up.  The political dialogue I like because they are civil and don’t talk over each other, so it stretches me to follow the conversation but not terribly so.

Spanish has one structural difference vs. English that makes a lot of sense to me: adjectives generally come after the nouns they modify.  IN English I might describe a “big, old, green, Chinese vase.”  You have to retain all those adjectives in the abstract before I finally give you something concrete (vase) for them to modify.  Spanish is the opposite – closer to saying “the vase that is big, old, green and Chinese.”  In the second way, the picture can grow in specificity as I describe it, but you have an easy starting point.

Conversely, one of my biggest gripes with Spanish is the indefinite articles that can precede verbs.  “Se le enconta” is like saying “he/she/formal you do something to it, and I know I will tell you that the action is to love and then I will tell you who is actually doing it.”

Life goes on

 Hey everyone.  Miss me?  Sure you do.  I have all sorts of random thoughts for you today.

What do you get when you combine beer, Worstershire  sauce, lime juice, and salt?  If that sounds like a drink for a frat party hazing, join the club.  Except here they call it a “michilada” and enjoy them.

A while back I went to a nicely developed shopping/living area that has a few restaurants.  It also has art out on a lawn, including an exotically-decorated ceramic horse – think about the thematically-painted cows in Houston or Dallas done as fund-raisers.  It was dark, and a lady was walking a bulldog.  When it came upon the dimly-lit horse it froze in a poised stance, thought for a moment, and then started aggressively barking to warn off the ceramic horse from making a wrong move.  While the barking at an inanimate object was funny enough, it was the noticeable moment of confusion for the dog that really made it hilarious for me and the couple walking the dog.  At the same time, the fact that the dog could recognize the outline as something that was supposed to be alive, but also realize that something was “off” enough to make it question whether it really was alive, is pretty amazing.

If you see any TV here, you will invariably see some ads with a black bar across the bottom essentially saying that the ad is written for a particular country, since the same networks broadcast across Central America (and I think, from the ads, the Andean region).  I’m not sure if the messages are truly meant to convey that they are only valid in a certain country, or if they are meant to get around laws (e.g. it may be illegal to make a direct comparison to competition in country X, but if I say the ad is written for country Y then I put it on the pan-national broadcast and shrug at accusations).

Did I mention that Costa Rica is beautiful?

Braces are pretty common here.  What is more surprising, perhaps, is that I normally see braces on adults, not kids – people anywhere from 25-40 or so, and I work with one guy who is >40 with braces.  It seems like it would be easier to do these earlier, of course, so I’m not sure if that is just a money issue (don’t have the money when you are 18, do have it when you are 35) or if people really think they shouldn’t get braces until then.

I mentioned previously that I went to hear some jazz music. Well, in the process I got my first big dose of “Tico time.”  The band was supposed to start at 9.  Knowing that musicians are never on time, and knowing this is Latin America, I decided to hedge and show up at 9 and expect the band to start playing at 9:30 or so.  Well, when I showed up at 9 I was the only person in the whole place.  The next person arrived at 9:30, and the band played at 10:15pm.  Lesson learned.

I have hit the beach a couple of times, and they certainly are nice beaches.  There are also certainly some posh resorts on those nice beaches.  One I drove past was called “Nativa.”  The thing that made it stand out, however, was the very pretty landscaping out front, where they had hacked down the dense growth that grew all around it, and replaced it with a nice lawn and some strategically-placed flowers. 

I also saw some cows happily grazing on a soccer field.  I guess it doesn’t get enough use to keep the grass short otherwise.

Old friends in new places

I had a visitor last weekend.  An old friend came into town for a few days, and I enjoyed the chance to catch up, show someone around, and put my spare bedroom to good use.

We headed up to Volcan (volcano) Poás early on Saturday and got a good view before the clouds rolled in, and took some pictures for a very friendly older couple that were from Georgia.   The guy later wanted a picture of the two of us against the volcano.  I’m trying hard not to see that as creepy.

Volcan Poás.  It's difficult to realize this by looking at a picture, but it's approximately one mile across.  That's a lot of dirt that got thrown somewhere.

We also did some hiking around the area.  The trail was interesting in part because the elevation changed a lot, and the flora did as well.  The elevation at Poas is ~2700m, which is higher than Denver, but there is still a rainforest around there because of the moisture from the clouds. 

At her prompting we headed to a coffee plantation to take a tour.  It’s the sort of thing I might get around to, but sounds pretty touristy and (as someone who doesn’t drink coffee) wouldn’t be high on my to-do list.  However, it was fascinating.  Even if it didn’t change my coffee-drinking habits.

The short version: it takes a lot of work to make your cup of coffee.  One person can pick ~28 lbs of coffee beans in an hour.  That becomes 4 lbs of coffee beans.  If each pound of coffee is ~8 cups, that means that you get ~32 cups of coffee from one hour of someone hand-picking coffee.  Oh, and did I mention that coffee picking season is during the rainy season?  And that it is grown on mountain slopes?  A worker gets $2-3 per 28 lbs (the standard coffee unit here).  If each 1 lb bag of coffee beans sells for $7 (and I have no idea of the price, but that sounds about right), then that’s $28 in final value.  If each of these turns into a Starbucks cup of coffee, that’s ~$120 in final value.  Just an interesting partial look at the economics of your coffee and how the proceeds are divided.

Pickers at this place (I don’t know about others) get free housing and schooling during the picking season.  Most are from Nicaragua, because the Costa Ricans don’t want the jobs.

PS: want your coffee decaf?  This place ships beans to Hamburg, where they are water-processed to remove caffeine, then shipped back to be processed alongside the regular beans.  That’s a lot of extra work.  The coffee plantation pays only shipping both ways; the German group takes its payment by keeping the extracted caffeine and selling to – you probably guessed it – Coke and energy-drink companies.

The weekend also made me realize something else: if you are a vegetarian, you’d better like rice and beans.  I’ve found it hard to get a lot of vegetables here, but at least I’m not trying to live on them.  My friend is now a gallo pinto connoisseur.