Arriving in Costa Rica

Arriving in Costa Rica

(Saturday August 20^th, 2011)

We still don't have internet so I'm borrowing Killillays.

The travel from Denver to Costa Rica went very well. We had no problems with overweight luggage or anything else. We got on the plane and had good flights with a good lay-over. I shared the gospel with the girl that sat next to Chase and I on the flight to from Huston to Costa Rica. She was a pagan but we had her pinned in by the window and she couldn't escape. She did actually say that it made a lot of sense the way I explained it. We arrived in Costa Rica about 9pm. We went through immigration and they never asked for our ticket out of the country. You can't have a one way ticket into Costa Rica so you have to have proof that you will leave in 90 days. We had bus tickets to Panama but don't intend on using them. We will get student visas while we are here. After immigration we went to baggage and actually got all of our bags. We then moved through customs and sent 15 bags through and they actually never even checked on of them. This is great because they could have opened and went through all of our bags and made us pay a tax on items we brought in. 

Our “Big Brother,” Mike had a van waiting to pick us up at the airport. The blast of humidity and heat when we hit outside was unexpected. They took us to our house and dropped us off. The house needed to be heavily cleaned but we were very tired so we just crashed. We basically had nothing in the house so we just slept on top of the beds with a few covers.

I woke up in the morning to a pile of stuff that looked like yeast on my side of the bed. Kim was certain that a bug of some sort laid a whole bunch of eggs on our bed and on me during the night. It was actually the termites that were eating the ceiling and spitting out saw dust on us. 

We also discovered that it is standard here to have little ants that take over parts of your house. We have a friendly community of ants in our pantry and kitchen and just about everywhere else. If you leave food out on the counter for more than a few minutes, they move in and devour it. Apparently this is just something you deal with.

Kim also found a huge cockroach in the laundry room. We are from Montana and have never seen a cockroach so we were grossed out. Those things are huge down here. For our fellow Montanan's, they are like the biggest pine beetle that you ever saw. Apparently a cockroach every once and a while is not a cockroach problems. I guess the people before us had them by the hundreds when they moved in. 

Because we moved into a house that pretty much had nothing, we had to go buy everything like bedding, pillows, towels, bathroom and kitchen supplies, pans, a coffee pot (which was the most important, we went without coffee the first day and started going through withdrawals), cleaning supplies, laundry supplies, and everything else that you can think of. Mike took us to a Wallmart which was great but it is opposite of the States as far as price. We go to Wallmart in the States because it is cheap but down here it is very expensive. Anything that is plastic, electronic, or American is twice as much as we are used to. There was a standard Rubber made garbage can there for $80. I never bought it but I did buy the cheapest coffee pot there and it was $40. I did buy Emmy a blow up swimming pool so she can play and cool off and she was very excited about it and plays in it everyday. We spend about $550 and got nothing. We also found a supermarket at our house but food is also very expensive. Money does not go far down here and I can see that we are going to have to be very thrifty to survive.

I tried to share the gospel with a guy on the street but I found out he was drunk so I gave him a tract and told him to read it tomorrow. I am running out of tracts and I need more very bad so if anyone can send me some I will let you know which ones and where to send them. Gracias.