Incredibly, the infected woman decided to ignore health officials and broke quarantine so she could attend classes at her university.

Thirty-five others are under watch.

A third person, a youngster, has flu symptoms (not yet confirmed as Swine Flu) possible infected by her father who recently returned to Costa Rica from Mexico. If confirmed, that would be the first case of swine flu caught within the borders.

The Ministry of Health this morning asked the passengers of two other flights, TACA LR 631 and Mexicana  387, to call 911 emergency so they may be tested.

Employees at the San Jose airport are wearing surgical masks, and many incoming passengers are having their temperatures taken upon arrival.

I am not going to go into this swine flu deal because unless my readers are living on another planet, you have been deluged with probably more information that you want to know.

I am more concerned though as my wife works at Calderon Guardia Hospital.

Did you see it?

Frontier Airlines ran an ad during the Superbowl that may interest you if you live near or can get to, Denver, Colorado  (all flights specials originate there).

Price Denver to San Jose, Costa Rica is $139.00 (each way) and that ain’t bad… BUT you have to book and pay TODAY by 9 PM MST.

Rules:

* Purchase by February 2, 2009
* Complete travel by June 10, 2009
* 14 day advance purchase required
* Choose off-peak travel days
o Tuesday – Wednesday for US
o Monday – Thursday for Costa Rica

Can you do it?  If so, come on down to Costa Rica! The weather is fine… though I DID see a cloud the other day!

Oh… and the temperature here this morning (in San Jose):   72 F

How is YOUR weather?

Those of us who live here deal with the many earthquakes.  Just a fact of life.  Those who live or have lived in California know all about it. The vast majority are small shocks (3-4) that rock the bed, make some noise and are generally not big deals.  Buildings in Costa Rica generally are built with a LOT of Rebar and concrete and most are very safe and suffer little damage. There are, however, many homes, especially in the country and areas not prosperous, that fall apart in the quakes.

This earthquake was nasty… 6.2. It was supposedly the strongest in 150 years… though I am not sure how they know that as the Richter Scale was not developed until the 1930’s.

There have been over 2,000 aftershocks of which we felt maybe 30. That in itself is unusual.

It did a lot of damage.  It hit on Thursday just after 1 PM. The most serious damage was as a result of landslides and homes just shifting and falling down hills and mountainsides. Many people were trapped under falling debris.

It was an odd quake.  I was taking a nap and was deeply (I think!) asleep when it hit. The entire house was moving and I do not mean a little. I called for the housekeeper who was really upset and we stood in a doorway until it passed.  Maybe 40 seconds or so. Most quales are kinda fun… this one was not.

Only damage to the house were some cracks in the patio.  Nothing in the house even fell… truly amazing as it was hard to stnd up!

I was lucky enough to get a call through to my wife whose office is on the 4th floor of Calderon Guardia Hospital.  She was scared but OK. The third floor suffered a lot of damage though.  No dead.

More soon… promise!

However, I did not want to discard it, and I decided it might be of general interest to a lot of readers, especially to older folks considering a trip to Costa Rica and more especially to older women who might like to travel together! Here is the account or the trip taken by Della and her female companion and written by Della.

My friend Joanna was treated to a Costa Rica ‘resorts only’ trip by her son and daughter in law last December. She came back psyched about living there and wanted to explore more of Costa Rica. So, I signed up on the ‘Real Costa Rica blog’ and started following comments -

We left San Diego, Ca. March 27th, having taken Frontier Airlines (cheapest, and least time spent) to San Jose. We had reserved a 4wh. dr. SUV, and headed out to explore the Nicoya Peninsula. We had a map from the rental office, and headed out, the hair on our back rising as we maneuvered getting out of San Jose. Once accomplished, and taking the ferry from Punterenas, we were much calmer and happier starting on our adventure.

We did follow the ‘rules for tourists’ as you mentioned, always taking our bags in at night, always having our auto within our sight. We did not wander at night -

Ticos seemed curious, interested and surprised to see two Sr. Citizens out and about, through back roads and inland, through small communities and farmland, and everyone we met was friendly, kind, helpful, and informative. Most did not speak English, we do not speak Spanish, but we learned the important words and used sign language to get around. We had such a wonderful time. We wanted to be in the culture, among the people, and we did just that. Pharmacias, cabinos, bancos, agua, banas, fruitas, we got by. Oh yes, we learned to say ‘mucho gusto’.

We stayed in family run cabins, and felt very safe.

I did most of the driving, and the mountains were the adrenalin pumpers for me – blind curves, large trucks, with only room for one vehicle at a time – sideless bridges, ruts in the ‘roads’ more like mud or gravel trails, that was more scary than anything else, but, we managed well.

Being able to stop when we saw a little ‘art shed’ and seeing the lovely art work, and being invited to meet the family – see the baby parrots, and Tucan, in the back yard, meeting the family’s children, both of us willing to try to communicate, giggling at our attempts – even in the off the beaten path, money was no problem as nearly everyone counted in dollars.

We usually were given a ‘typical breakfast’ included with our cabin, in the a.m. I like eggs over easy, and this is not very common I guess so I asked if I could make them myself, so they let me make them, in their kitchen.
Fun…

We found a glorious little teak cabin that one family had put up, cut into the mountain, overlooking the vastness below, and the ocean way in the distance. Breathtaking.
Since it was the end of the dry season, water was sometimes low, and these people were so sorry the town had cut the water, that they gave us not only a wonderful breakfast, typical style, but made fresh corn tortillas and lots of rice and beans, and cut mangos to take with us for lunch. They showed us their cage full of quail and eggs they considered a real delicacy.

It was odd to me that near the ocean, it was so hot – due to the proximity to the equator. Hadn’t thought of that….

Montezuma we liked a lot, we stayed in a very nice hotel, and the restaurants were superb…. Cobano was like going back in time 60 or 70 years. our last two days we stayed in San Jose, with our auto parked in the hotel ‘basement’ at night. We found the hotel as it was getting dark, and were glad of it, because a few blocks away as we were looking for a bed and breakfast sign we had seen, we found ourselves in a huge very ‘ghetto’ neighborhood, then a few blocks further, a neighborhood with lovely homes, completely ironed in, driveway and all, and men with billy clubs and dogs guarding the streets.’

The hotel staff was friendly, informative and fun to converse with as well. A huge park several blocks away had an art festival every Sunday and we found some great treasures.

My friend is still interested in living there, but I have a bad back, and cannot imagine driving the roads there, where about l% of the country, it seems, is paved.

I am thankful we had the ‘Real Costa Rica blog’ as our guide -

If she does move, she has no rose colored glasses on now, and will more than likely rent, and not buy. Very good help on that.

I will come again to visit!!! – and learn more Spanish as well. We arrived back home on April l3th. It was the best l7 day adventure we have ever had. People are people, everywhere, and looking for the similarities, and being willing to explore the differences, using common sense, looking forward to each day’s difference as we headed out in the am was really very special.

So this is a great thank you for the time and effort put into keeping the blog going, and people contributing as well.

Thanks for the nice words and thanks for sharing your vacation with us. I enjoyed reading your account, and I hope my readers will also.

(Next time you come, do read The REAL Costa Rica main web site. Then you will know just how hot are the beaches in Costa Rica.)

Those of you who follow my writings probably already know about Rolando, the Flying Cucaracha Affair, and the occasion tarantulas that come avisitin’ at Casa Ticogrande. However, for sheer annoyance, nothing can top the ants (hormigas). that look at this house as a giant smörgåsbord.

When I speak of ants, I am not referring to one or two… or fifty. I am referring to, in some cases hundreds (or more).

The other night, I called Maria Luisa to the kitchen to witness a true phenomenon. Starting at the base of the counter, crawling up the side of the counter, across all three counter tops (maybe 20 feet) and disappearing into a crack near the edge of the counter were ants. Thousands of ants. I bent close and could hear them singing some sort of marching song.

Our ants are not limited to the kitchen. Oh no! They travel! They come out of the floor in my office, they live in my desk. They live in our bedside tables and on occasion, they join us in bed as we watch TV!

They come in various sizes! Some are very tiny. Some are big mothers, black and nasty looking! They crunch when you step on ‘em.

We also get other critters like the tarantula, an occasional scorpion and some things that I know not the name. We also get the flying cucarachas of course and those really BIG cucharachas about the size of a box of matches. My wife won’t let me touch those as she assures me they eat the smaller cucharachas that gross out everyone. She may be right as we never see those!

Drop anything on the floor and within seconds, it is covered with hundreds of the really tiny ants. “Anything” here can also mean a dead bug of any specie.

The kitchen thing did it for me! The next day I am on the phone to the Cruz Verde. The Cruz Verde are the bug people, the CR equivalent to the Orkin man. Cruz Verde means Green Cross in Spanish. I have no idea from whence came that name, but there you have it.

They arrived on time, and we want about carefully locking up the dog, both cats and the parrot. These guys take this bug thing seriously and they spray inside, outside, in cupboards, along floors, in my desk and nightstand… the works. Two guys – one hour. We are told that we can free the animals from prison in an hour… but I wait three as our animals are family.

Yesterday? No bugs! OK a few but clearly they did their job well which they should have for the $60.00 they accepted as they left.

Today?  None.  Sixty day guarantee, and they want to be in my wallet every six months.

Think I’ll just wait until I hear that marching song again.

I was speaking to the owner of one of the larger moving companies some while back, and he told me that he is now moving back “home” more than 50% of the customers he moved here originally. That is a helluva statistic, and he should know. I tend to believe this as I get more and more email from people who have made the decision to move here after spending little and sometimes no time in this country. Sadly, some have no option as they are just now realizing that they simply cannot afford to retire and live in their home country. This is true especially of many folks from the USA.

So can anything be done so that you do not become one of those statistics returning home tail twixt your legs? I think so! The first thing that you must realize is that every single thing you do every day while living here will be different than it was before. Getting a haircut, stopping at the drug store, going to the cleaners, taking kids to schools, shopping for food or clothes, dealing with the metric system… everything will change.

The key to all this is communication! Supermarkets, drugstores, dry cleaners here look about the same as they do “back home”. The difference is the language. If they all just spoke your native language like English, things would be great, right?

To those who have visited Costa Rica or will do so prior to coming, you must remember that you will be living (or lived) in an bubble. You’re surrounded by English speakers and in some hotels, French and German speakers as well. This is the tourist Costa Rica and not the REAL Costa Rica. In the real Costa Rica, Spanish is the language, and to really get comfy here and enjoy the expat lifestyle, you gotta learn Spanish.

There are numerous language courses, a few of which are advertised on the side of this page. The problem is that the good ones are not cheap. So with that in mind, I thought I’d introduce you to Coffee Break Spanish (CBS). CBS is presented more or less free, and they take you from nothing to survival Spanish pretty quickly and easily. You can listen online, download the lessons to your computer or listen on your iPod or mp3 player. You can even burn them to a CD.

So to all you future expats… start now and pick up the lingo. I cannot promise and 100% easy transition to Costa Rica, but I can promise it will go a whole lot smoother.

Helpful link: Spanish Schools in Costa Rica

This phenomena occured on 9 June when I wrote the post entitled “3,000 Jobs Gone? Why?“. I am 99% sure I read in La Nacion that the new regulation had been published in La Gaceta. It appears I was wrong and it was not published. As Bugs Bunny would say, “Whatta maroon!”.

In Costa Rica, before a law or government decree can be enforced, it must be first published in La Gaceta. The fact that it was not explains why, during my (purely research based) visits to the various casinos, I found them operating as normal. So now I must grovel to my readers and apologize for the mistake. The rest of that post is just fine.

However some of these changes will be published… perhaps as soon as this week, though it seems the decree affecting hours may not be published. If it is, those 3,000 workers will be unemployed as nearly all casinos are 24 hour per day businesses, and the reduction to an 8 hour day (6PM to 2AM will certainly hurt a lot of people.

But… as the government does not appear any too anxious to publish the decree relating to hours, who knows? Could be somebody’s brain kicked in and they realize what a truly bad idea is the cutting of jobs.

Further, there seems to be some question as to whether these decrees will affect existing businesses. One of the new “rules” is that a casino must be part of (actually IN) a hotel and may not take up more than 15% of the total space. How places like the Horseshoe, a landmark and not connected to any hotel, will fare is anybodys guess. The same is true for the Fiesta Casino near the San Jose airport. It too stands alone.

Anyway… now you know!

The price of super gasoline would go up to ¢801 per liter and diesel prices would fall by ¢97. Gasoline today is $5.10 per gallon for super, $4.97 for regular and $4.82 for diesel. One US gallon = 3.79 liters, so after this change, a gallon of super will be ¢3,036 or $5.88. With the regular monthly increase coming in July, $6.00 per gallon gas is pretty much assured.

Currently, the cost for a gallon of diesel is $4.82, so this will drop to about $4.11. Sounds like a nice windfall for those who chose to buy dieseled vehicles right? Nope… the government giveth and the government taketh away.

To further offset the loss of tax revenue from diesel, the government plans another little surprise to those who own non commercial diesel vehicles i.e. not your personal car or SUV. Marchamo for non commercial vehicles will double. So if you are currently donating $1,000 per year in Marchamo for your reasonably late model diesel SUV, plan on taking a $1,000 hit come December. About 66,000 private cars use diesel fuel. Last year, owners of diesel cars paid about ¢8,500 million in property tax. If approved, this will double to around ¢17,000 million.

Why is this happening? The idea here is that by reducing the cost of diesel fuel, almost exclusively used by transport semis and delivery vehicles, the resultant savings in transportation costs would be passed on down to the consumer resulting in lower prices at the cash register.

Call me skeptical, but I am way to olde to believe that what amounts to a windfall profit for owners of dieseled vehicles will pass on anything. I expect it to go into their pockets and not into the pockets of consumers. As enforcement would be difficulty or impossible, I am not expecting a reduction in food or other prices real soon.

Whether this will come to pass is unclear, but at least the government is trying to be inventive and try new strategies.

The system was/is simple enough. You were restricted from entering San Jose for about 2 hours each morning rush hour and two hours during the afternoon rush based on your license plate. For me it was rarely an issue, and when it was, I just drove the circunvalación, the road that runs around San Jose and locally known as “the rotundas” because of the numerous traffic circles in that route. Sometimes I’d drive the La Uruca route. No big deal.

Well this all changed this week as the government expanded enormously the restricted areas and the hours of restriction, and yesterday, over a thousand folks learned this the hard way and got a little $10 traffic citation for their ignorance.

The restrictions are based on the last digit of the license plate (placa). 1 & 2 on Mondays, 3 & 4 on Tuesdays, 5 & 6 on Wednesdays, 7 & 8 on Thursdays; and 9 & 0 on Fridays. As my plate ends in a “2″, Monday is my day.

As I said, the problem was never a biggie until the MOPT increased enormously the restrited area and also increased the hours per day. From the relatively small area in downtone San Jose, the restriction has now been widened in all directions to include all area between the circunvalación on the south side, the Hotel Radisson in La Uruca, Calle Blancos on the north, Pavas on the west and San Pedro Mall on the east.  See map at top – click to enlarge it.

The restricted hours were also changed to from 6am to 9am in the morning and 4pm to 7pm in the evening.

The change this week was less for traffic reduction (though it was certainly noticeably less!), than for attempting to force everyone to use public transportation. Gasoline today is priced at $5.10 per gallon for super, $4.97 for regular and $4.82 for diesel, and this new restriction along with the proposed changes should have some affect on drivers. It sure has for me!

One step I think could be important would be to change what happens if there is a traffic accident. Current law (rules?) state that if you have an accident, you must not move the vehicles no matter how minor the accident.

What is worse though, is that not only must you not move the vehicle(s), you must wait until both the police and the insurance investigator arrive! ANyone who lives here can tell of backups sometimes miles long behind some minor fender-bender. Not only is this hugely annoying, it kills me to see maybe 500 to 2,000 cars all waiting in the traffic jam, engines running and burning a ton of fuel. With gas prices soon to exceed $6.00 per gallon, I am sure a few, but not all, will turn off the engines.

The government is also making noises about expanding this to all of Costa Rica.  I suppose they would have to exempt rental cars to avoid hassling the tourists.  Now that would have an effect, especially if they had anywhere near the police to enforce it!

We shall see how all this sakes out, but for now, to those of you living here in Costa Rica but not in the San Jose area, be careful when you come here to visit your friendly local embassy!  This new rules affects access to the US Embassy in Rohrmoser just east of Pavas as well as the Canadian embassy in La Sabana plus numerous others.

Holidays and weekends are not included in these restrictions.

Lately, the active volcano has been strutting her stuff, and this has been going on for some weeks now. Customers of mine witnessed a fine show just this week.

The volcano is near the town of La Fortuna de San Carlos, about three hours northwest of San Jose by car. We go fairly often and rooms are always easy to get, especially now in the low season. The beds in many of the hotels are positioned so you can watch it at night. Beats Leno!

Wanna see something cool? Come take a peak! Bring the camera.