Travel

Have visa, will move to France

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.

Howler Monkeys

Howler MonkeysSome 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. Continue reading →

…Being Here

Costa RicaAfter a week and a half, things are settling into a routine. The dial up is painfully slow, but I’m learning to do all of my writing offline and just connect to copy/paste and send. It’s great to work for a couple of hours, go for a swim, work some more, walk on the beach, work a bit, etc.

Our neighbor is a lodge with a great restaurant and one of the best views in the area – 180 degrees of surf, sand, river, and forest reserve. The beaches are gorgeous and the water is almost warm. Continue reading →

…Arriving…

…and were happily surprised at the size. It’s a studio with a full kitchen and bath, and the half-covered terrace is just gorgeous. With the French doors open, it’s a big indoor/outdoor apartment. There’s a lovely pool that we didn’t expect to use, but have been going in on average twice a day, next to a barbecue area. The grounds are extremely lush, with different kinds of flowers as well as plantain, banana, papaya, mango, and avocado trees, and there’s a spot where we’ll be able to plant some tomatoes and lettuce.

Costa RicaIt’s hot (80ish), breezy, and very humid, and it rains off and on throughout the day, sometimes quite unexpectedly. The beaches are gorgeous and pretty much deserted at the moment. The ocean water is fairly cool at the beach closest to us and warmer at the better surfing beach to the south, which is the one we can see from our terrace.

Getting there…

Wednesday was a very long day. I woke up at 5:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I spent most of the day making sure both laptops were up to date and packing up my desk while my husband did the geometry required to stuff nearly everything we own into the slightly too small 10×10 foot storage space. We also had to deal with transferring the car title, make two post office runs, visit the accountant, go to one bank to withdraw money and another to fill up our safe deposit box (we didn’t get there until after it closed, so then had to ask a friend to do it for us the next day – let’s hope he’s honest! ;-)) All in all, we didn’t finish packing until 10pm and didn’t get dropped off at our hotel by the airport until 11. By the time we checked in and ate it was after midnight, and our wake-up call was for 3:45. Ugh. Continue reading →

� Previous Page Next Page �