Birthday Masks and Spanish Barbies

We celebrated Naimah’s birthday with a cake last night and wanted to buy party hats for the kids like we do in Canada. However, in Costa Rica, it seems that it is the tradition to wear masks at birthday parties instead and therefore, that is all that we could find in stores. The kids were more than pleased to have a little masquerade.

Naimah loves Barbie and wanted a doll from the movie “The Diamond Castle”. We were lucky to find a doll in one of the stores in a nearby town but of course, the doll doesn’t sing in English, it sings in Spanish. Naimah officially now has Barbies that speak English, French, and Spanish… I hope Ken can understand them all.

Happy 4th Birthday, Naimah!

It doesn’t feel like long ago that she was still a baby.

Parque de Diversiones

Naimah’s birthday is tomorrow. To celebrate the occasion, we wanted to do something special so we went to a great amusement park in San José called Parque de Diversiones. The kids had a fantastic time.

All of the pictures can be found here.

Golden orb-weavers

If you don’t like snakes, you have to do your best to get over that fear in Costa Rica. The same goes for spiders in this area of the world because there are many of them. I have been taking pictures of all of the insects and arachnids that we come across so that we can search on the Internet in order to figure out what we have actually seen. The unofficial roles and responsibilities in our family: the kids find the creatures, I “ooh and aah” and snap some photos, and Mélanie steers clear when they are extra big.

The kids discovered an especially large spider last weekend:

It is a golden orb-weaver and it is very impressive when you see it up close. I explained to Gabriel that the tensile strength of its web is much stronger than steel – hence the reason why Spiderman’s web is so strong (there is no better way to make these things click than when I use a superhero reference).

Speaking of Spiderman… Gabriel prepared a little daypack by himself before we headed out this morning for a daytrip. Neither myself nor Mélanie checked before we left to see what he had packed (I figured it might just be some toys). When we came home and opened it after the kids had gone to sleep, we discovered that he had packed some Spiderman costumes (I guess in case he ran into trouble out on the Costa Rican streets and needed to quickly change into his alter ego).

Copyright Laws Don’t Seem To Apply Here

We have yet to find a video rental place that rents legal copies of DVDs. This country is flooded with bootleg videos.

135 Species of Snakes

In Costa Rica, there are 135 species of snakes, and only 17 are known to be venomous. Experts state that the different venomous snakes found in Costa Rica are not exactly easy to find, and that most of the snakes in Costa Rica are nocturnal and usually just rest up during the day. These facts don’t make Mélanie feel any better especially after she came across this when sweeping outside our bathroom:

A snake had decided to squeeze itself through a tiny hole in the stone wall that circles our house in order to molt. Mélanie is quite scared of snakes and getting direct confirmation that at least one of the 135 species in Costa Rica likes to hang out at our house doesn’t help matters. (Although I found it fascinating that snakes can climb vertical surfaces like our stone walls.)

Pouring salt on the wound, the first thing that Léah reported when she came home, “Jésus, a boy in my school, got bitten by a snake today”. You should have seen Mélanie’s face.

In a panic, Mélanie spoke to one of the gardeners working nearby to allay her fears. His response? “You shouldn’t worry about the snakes; it’s the scorpions that are dangerous.” Oh great, those molt in our clothes drawers!

“This is where the pig tail twisted”

“Aquí fue donde la chancha torcío el rabo” is a Costa Rican expression which literally translates to, “this is where the pig tail twisted”; however, the equivalent expression in English would be, “here is where the crap hit the fan”. In general, our experience has been positive but the last week has had some real rough spots.

It hasn’t been a complete breeze with the kids at school because we still take a deep breath each morning and hope that all will go well with our 2 younger ones. This morning went smoothly but we are realistic that we have to take each day at a time. No doubt there will be good days and bad days.

After we believed that our car situation was behind us last week, we started planning a road trip for the weekend and even thought to leave right after school/work on Friday. One important thing about a road trip: the car needs to actually start. Sadly for us, our new-used car decided not to start on Friday morning, or Friday night, or even Saturday morning. I had to call roadside assistance for a tow truck and it was very difficult just to explain our whereabouts when the person on the other end of the phone only spoke Spanish. When the tow truck finally found me 2 hours later, it was a bizarre experience (to say the least) coordinating a compression-start of the car with someone who didn’t speak a word of English.

When we finally got the issues with our car resolved midday  Saturday, we headed an hour west of us to Playa Hermosa to see the ISA World Surfing Games which can be described as the “Olympics of surfing”. We hadn’t made a reservation at a hotel and we regretted it when it took us a few hours to find somewhere to stay. The kids were amazingly patient in the car as we stopped at literally every single hotel to ask if they had a room. We did finally find a place before it got dark and made sure that it at least had a pool to reward the kids. The accommodation was way more than we had hoped to spend but we didn’t really have a choice – we weren’t exactly going to sleep 5 of us in our old truck. Everything was starting to seem much brighter this morning. We had just come back from a great overnight stay on the coast where we saw some world class surfing, and our 3 kids were happy when we dropped them off at school this morning. Both Mélanie and I were feeling pretty positive… until we got a message from our real estate agent that we have to be out of the house that we are staying in at the beginning of September. This is the same guy who has been telling us that it won’t be a problem for us to stay as long as we want. So now we are stuck with the possibility of not having a place to stay in 5 weeks. We wouldn’t be so stressed about it if there were many other options in this area but unfortunately, the rental market is so dry here right now. It was such a struggle finding our current place before we left on our trip (actually, we only confirmed it a week before we left) and now we are back to square one.