Costa Rica Journal - Thursday, 4-16-09

We had planned on waking up early to go into town with Amy, but it did not work out that way. Our morning was spent at home, recovering from the physical and emotional toil of the previous day. For breakfast, we enjoyed coffee, and a Probar as well as some leftovers that we heated up from last nights dinner. By then, it was late morning and then two of the Finca Leola workers came over and fixed the leaky faucet. After the workers left we rested, as Joe wasn't feeling well. It was agreed that we needed to take it easy for the day and not go into town. Unfortunately, we had no phone, so we couldn't call Amy to let her know.

As the day worn on, we got out of the house and tried to walk to Pejibaye to find another market. Being midday, it wasn't a very good time to be walking about and we had to turn bank before we got there, because we forgot to put on sunscreen. Still, it was nice to get out and explore, even though we burned our skin. On the way back, we made a stop at the Cabanga market for some ice cream to cool us down. We also used this stop to get some bread and eggs which I prepared for Joe when we got home.

We spent some time playing our instruments and then we decided to tackle the task of burning our garbage. Fred came over during this, bringing me a coconut gift. He invited us to go on a short bike ride of Cabanga where we visited one of his workers, Eduardo, who lived by the soccer field just down the road from us. He turned out to be a very nice, former school teacher being able to speak a little English. Fred suggested that we help each other out, him teaching us Spanish and us teaching him English.

After our brief visit, we all rode our bikes a little more around Cabanga and stopped at the market where Fred bought us another ice cream. It was really good talking to him as we got out some of our anxieties about living here and he reassured us that we could make a decent living by internet marketing. This helped out a lot, and we also came to the conclusion that it was smarter to buy an ATV first for transportation, and worry about a car later, when it becomes more necessary. An ATV is really all we need right now, and its so much cheeper. But this time, the sun was going down and it was time to say goodbye to fred. We were very happy that he came over to talk to us. It was just what we needed to calm our nerves of living here.