Costa Ricans are Caring
Today as we were returning home, a man fell out of the back of a bus! It looked like a school bus and it had several sacks of something in the back. The man must have been sitting on the sacks and leaning against the rear door. As the bus began to accelerate up a hill, out he fell. I was amazed and encouraged to witness people run from all directions to assist this poor guy. By the time our car reached the place where he had fallen, there were probably a dozen people gathered around him offering help, and more were on the way! Sadly, I thought that this would not happen in the United States. People seem to have lost their natural inclination to lend a helping hand, to care for their neighbor.
House Hunt
We called a realtor who works in Puriscal. He showed us three properties that are currently for rent in the area. Two were Tico homes, and one was built by a retired American contractor. Not too surprisingly, the American style home appealed to us the most. However, the rent was considerably higher than the others and it had no back yard. One of the Tico homes had a terribly musty smell to it, and a very odd kitchen. We will most likely continue our search…
Money Transfer Update
When we finally made it to an internet cafe around 11:00 AM, I checked our CR bank account online. I was very discouraged to see a balance of $14.00. This is the same amount that has been there since we opened the account back in July. I was hoping to see that the wire transfer had finally made it to our account. Since it was not there, I gave Dave another call to see what he could do. He called the bank and they assured him that the transfer went through and that the money had been available since 4:00 PM yesterday. I then went to the ATM machine with my bank card, and sure enough the transfer had shown up!
Bill Payments
One of the interesting customs in Costa Rica is bill paying. Since they never bothered to take the time to name streets and assign numbers to homes, they also never got around to developing a reliable postal service. Without being able to mail bills around, they had to come up with another system. This system consists of people going to various locations in town where they can then pay their bills. In Puriscal, this ritual is carried out in the local Red Cross station. Not knowing this, I foolishly went to the phone company building. After several confusing minutes talking to the security guards where the only word I recognized was “roja” (red for you gringos), I finally made it next door to the Red Cross station. I was then able to pay my cell phone bill and thus avoid having it turned off.