LKL’s Blog

For our third and final Costa Rica visa renewal,* my husband and I went to Panama City for 4 days. Our immediate impression was that it was a lot like Costa Rica, except much, much cheaper. The weather is similar, beaches are similar - although of course Panama has much higher ratio of coastline to inland. Costa Rica is so touristed that prices keep going up, but I guess Panama doesn’t get as many visitors, other than to the canal.

Speaking of which, we did the partial canal cruise - I would have liked to do the full, but it’s only offered twice a month by every single company I checked with, and all pretty much the same days. It’s just as well, as the half day was more than enough. To be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed by the canal. Yes, it’s huge and an amazing feat of engineering and the locks are tremendous, but, well, it’s just not that exciting, you know?

*Upon entering Costa Rica, Americans (I don’t know what it’s like for citizens of other countries) get a stamp in your passport that allows you to stay for three months. You have to leave the country for at least 72 hours to get it renewed, and apparently there are people that have been doing this over and over for years. The government is cracking down a bit though - they say that they start looking at you a little suspiciously the third time you leave and return, but we didn’t have any trouble.

Good-bye 2007 (does anyone else notice that could read Good-bye to 007 [double oh seven]? Is this a sign of James Bond’s future?) and hello 2008. It was a good year - I spent more than half of it in Costa Rica. But this year will be even better, as I’ll spend the majority of it in France. I hope you too will have some long-cherished dreams come true.

Here’s some reading material and ideas for New Year’s Resolutions for you:

New Year’s in France
French New Year’s Resolutions
Veggie Table New Year’s Resolutions

I hope you and your families are happy, safe, and warm this holiday season. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

Vegetarian Christmas Menu
Christmas in France
French Christmas Vocabulary
Spanish Christmas Vocabulary

I lived in Casablanca, Morocco for exactly 2½ years, from September 2000 to March 2003. My long-time fiancé was teaching English, and I was already a full-time freelancer. After a year, we went up to Gibraltar to get married, in large part because I had to keep leaving the country to renew my visa every three months. We were in Morocco on 9/11, and we left Morocco - coincidentally - the day before the war in Iraq began. (About a month later, several bombs exploded at places we’d been to: a restaurant near our apartment which we loved, and the Spanish cultural center.) Morocco is a beautiful, diverse country filled with extraordinarily generous people. I wrote a series of articles about it while I was there: Moroccan Culture Series

We’ve been living on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica for 7 months now - enough to experience both the rainy (or green) season and the dry season. We arrived in mid-May, and from then until mid-August the weather was perfect: 75-80 degrees, with a few hours of rain at least 3 or 4 times a week (including a number of truly spectacular thunderstorms). In August, it started raining a lot more - in fact, a friend from New York was visiting and unfortunately it rained nearly every day. The moment she left, the skies cleared and the weather was again gorgeous until late September, when it started raining more and more. For about 3 weeks in October, it rained almost non-stop, then it gradually died down. Now, in early December, it’s been dry for a couple of weeks. However, it’s also really hot - 85-90 degrees, and will just keep getting hotter and drier until April.

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I guess this is old news, but somehow it completely passed me by. 40% of the world’s oceans is covered in garbage - primarily plastic - concentrated in 5 enormous gyres, or vortexes. I can’t even wrap my head around the staggering amount of garbage this represents. There’s a stretch of land between Casablanca and Rabat, Morocco, that is just covered in plastic bags as far as the eye can see. It’s the place where Plastic Bags Go To Die, or so I thought. Apparently, it’s just a stopover on their way to join their brethren in the oceans.

Plastic bags are absolutely everywhere. In both Morocco and Costa Rica, they’re stacked high in shops, and it’s not uncommon to walk out of a store with $10 worth of groceries in 3 or 4 bags. Even though we bring bags with us, the baggers always seem to be trying to give us more bags, as if to make us feel we got our money’s worth. In the US, the “paper or plastic?” debate was never really resolved. Even our local natural foods store offerred both - though at least they were usually reused.

I don’t know. It’s not as if I have some amazing insights to share on this subject, but I just couldn’t bear to ignore it. Here’s more info, if you’re interested.

The Plastic Sea
Our Oceans Are Turning Into Plastic… Are We?
North Pacific Subtropical Gyre Garbage Map

This book was published in 2006, but I only just got around to reading it, and the only reason I bought it in the first place was that I noticed it on a friend’s bookshelf and liked the cover. I’m amazed that I never heard anyone talking about it, and no one ever recommended it to me, because it’s fantastic. It’s the true story of a woman who spends a year finding herself by eating (and learning Italian) in Italy, praying in India, and loving in Indonesia. It’s funny, it’s touching, it’s inspiring - it’s just a fantastic book. Don’t miss out like I almost did - read Eat, Pray, Love.

Yes, that’s right - the French visa court was so moved by our appeal that, after only a year of deliberation, they decided to grant us our long-stay visas. We picked them up last month, and now we’re good to go. We’ll be moving sometime between Febrary and April, 2008, but we’re not sure where yet. Originally, we planned to go back to Toulouse, since we loved it so much. But then I started thinking about how nice it would be to live near the beach, so Nice and Marseille started looking good. And then we wondered about living all over - spending a month or so in a dozen different cities, and that’s what we’re leaning toward right now. There are several problems with that:

1. It’s expensive to move once, let alone 12 times
2. It’d be a pain to find a new apartment every month
3. I would need a (likely expensive) wireless internet connection, because many French rentals don’t have fixed phones

I’ve got some good leads on number 3, so now I’m doing some research on number 2 - maybe we could find a rental agent who could help us find a place in each city, something like that.

In any case, it’s still all way up in the air, but at least now we know for sure that in just a few months we’ll be moving to France for a year - something I’ve been wanting to do for more than half my life.

Some of the most visible - and audible - wildlife here in Costa Rica are the howler monkeys. They travel through the trees, and their “howl” is far deeper and louder than their appearance suggests - sort of a cross between a growl and a moan. They tend to howl when they feel threatened or are unhappy, and one of the things that seems to make them unhappy is rain, which means they howl a lot. When several howl in unison, the sound can be pretty creepy - like something out of a horror movie. (more…)

Now that I live in Costa Rica, bugs are not just annoying, but downright disruptive. There are a few mosquitoes, but it’s the no-see-ums that are really bad. Since I don’t like chemicals, I’ve been trying out some natural remedies, and there are a few that work: Natural remedies for bug bites