These things I will miss about Costa Rica

Beanie’s Costa Rican flag and beach.

Hello, friends.

As we wind down our time in Costa Rica, I’ve been looking through our photos and reliving all that we have experienced. Time has moved slowly for me here, and our four months have felt much longer than that. In fact, I was surprised when I counted the months we’ve spent here and realized they totaled only four.

I’m not sure what has caused time to trickle by—perhaps our early and quiet nights? The sun sets at about 5:30pm every day, and we’ve found ourselves sleeping and waking earlier than usual. On the rare occasions our family goes out at night, our habit is to look at our watches and tell one another how amazed we are that it’s only 7:30pm, when really it should be 11. We do this every time.

The good thing about time passing slowly is that the sweet moments linger. That the natural world is so colorful and bright in Costa Rica adds to this, and the memories we’ve created are vivid in my mind.

Here are some of the memories I’ll look back upon with fondness:

• First and foremost, the people—all the Ticos and Ticas have been friendly and patient, even on the many occasions I’ve given them my deer-in-the-headlights look because my Spanish comprehension is so limited. Truly wonderful.

• The open air eateries, with bonus skitties (skinny kitties). Almost every restaurant here is open to the outdoors; the atmosphere is casual and relaxed, and healthy in this era of too many viral infections.

• And my favorite kind of open air eatery is the restaurant on the beach. Special mention to Waffle Monkey, where you can eat sugary, fluffy waffles with your feet in the sand. A very pleasant thing to do.

• This view out of our living room window

  

  View from our window

• Watching two yellow butterflies chase each other, which I see daily in that view outside our window. There are beautiful and interesting butterflies everywhere, in yellow and many other colors. Here is a large owl butterfly that obligingly stayed still even after we got up close to admire it. It does look very owl-like, doesn’t it?

  

• Just a whole load of fascinating wildlife all around, both warm-blooded…

Top (left to right): Sleeping two-toed sloth Maria; boat-billed heron; young yellow-crowned night heron. Bottom: Three-toed sloth; capuchin monkey showing off his croissant

• …and cold-blooded.

Left to right: A very poisonous fer-de-lance snake; a green lizard; a red-eyed tree frog..

• Having a pool downstairs and weather that invites swimming almost all the time.

• Peeking over the ledge of the swimming pool downstairs, at the iguanas sunning themselves on big rocks.

• Fresh fruit juices at every restaurant. I always get watermelon, Beanie always gets strawberry.

• The good coffee. I’ve always been partial to coffee beans from Central America, and all the coffee I’ve had here has been quality, from the fancy drip coffees at fancy hotels to the bags of coffee off the shelf at the supermarket.

Making coffee the traditional way.

• Insects! I will not miss the mosquitoes or the ants that crawl onto my hands and cutting board as I’m prepping dinner, but there are some cool supersized critters here. Look at these! The one on the left is an elephant beetle that was almost as big as my hand. On the right is a grasshopper near our apartment that made me do a double-take. I have never seen a grasshopper of this size; I estimate it was 6 inches long. I stared at it for a good minute in fascination.

Left: A huge elephant beetle. Right: A huge grasshopper.

• Last but not least: all the interesting things you see just driving down the road. The other day I saw a row of vultures perched on a fence, all with their wings spread wide. Apparently, they do that mainly to regulate body temperature. More than once, I’ve been stuck behind a herd of cows moving down the road. Once, the herd was coming toward me and it took me a moment to realize what the moving mass was. Fortunately, there was room on the side to pull over and watch them go by (I took the photo below then). It definitely feels less frustrating being held up by a traffic jam of cows than a traffic jam of cars, and I will miss that. Pura Vida!

I pulled over to let this herd of cows pass me by.

Pretty Good Things

This kid is a Pretty Good Thing who turns nine today! We quite like her.

Arroz con pollo

I’ve made 5 or 6 Costa Rican recipes and they were all solid. I’m sure I’ll make them again even after we leave. The dish I’ve made the most—probably close to 10 times now—is arroz con pollo, which Taz has claimed he can eat all day every day, forever. I’m testing his claim with this last batch I made, which could probably feed two dozen people. It’ll be arroz morning, noon, and night for him until we leave.

This is the recipe I follow. I don’t know how it compares to other recipes, but the result is tasty, and it’s very easy to make. I’ve seen other arroz con pollo recipes that have you cook the chicken from scratch, but I don’t mind this hack of using ready-made rotisserie chicken. Quite a bit quicker!

One of the many times I’ve made arroz con pollo recently.