Geodog: Costa Rica

Impressions of Costa Rica after a month's visit: Tico Time

The pace of life in Costa Rica is considerably slower than it is in the United States. Part of this was undoubtedly because we traveled as tourists, mostly in rural Costa Rica, in the low season. I'm sure that it would have been somewhat different in San Jose in the high season, or working at Intel's plant in Heredia. Still, people in Costa Rica aren't as frantic about getting things done on time as people are in the US. Costa Ricans act as though people are more important than deadlines, and people expect to make time for each other, and to wait for other people and to have other people wait for them. Expatriates, and some Costa Ricans, call this living on Tico Time. Punctuality is not next to godliness, and waiting is not seen as offensive, or as a waste of time. We ran into this all the time. The best example of this was one day when a hotel owner offered to take us and some other people in the hotel up to see turtles coming ashore to lay eggs at Ostional (a fantastic trip). He said that we would leave the hotel after lunch, and I asked him exactly when after lunch we should be ready to go. He shrugged his shoulders, looked at me and slapped his empty wrist and said "you see a watch? We will leave when everybody is ready to go." It worked both ways -- once we were about to go out to dinner and another hotel owner stopped us and asked if we would help her middle-school aged son with his homework, because he had a test the next day but was still confused about the difference between the comparative and the superlative. Having made her house into a home for our family (mi casa es su casa), she expected that we would do no less for her family. So we happily postponed our dinner for an hour to tutor her son.

Living with tico time was not always easy. One morning we got up early, hoping to climb up to the top of Rincón de la Vieja volcano before it was covered with clouds, but when we got to the entrance to Rincón de la Vieja National Park, we found a scene from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. There was long line of other hikers waiting to pay the entrance fee at the guard hut. There was only one person taking the entrance fee, and he was filling out meaningless paperwork (name, nationality, passport number, hotel staying at ...) for each person and giving lengthy directions to each person, while other guards lounged around outside the hut. However, instead of standing in line feeling my blood pressure rise, I had someone save me a place and went off in search of a White-Faced Coati that some other hikers had seen earlier, and was rewarded by watching one eat some fruit for 15 minutes. I relearned the motto of Carl Franz, the writer of the The People's Guide to Mexico, the world's best guide book, "Wherever you go ... There you are!"

On the whole, while tico time drove me nuts in some respects, and it would require some significant retraining of my type A personality to live and work in Costa Rica, the fact that people made time for people, and that they rarely seemed rushed or in a hurry was extremely pleasant, and a welcome change from the frantic pace of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. When we returned to the United States, I felt the change immediately. I went into our local supermarket on my first day back, and immediately felt like a stone-age native transported into the 21st century. People were moving so fast! They were racing in the parking lot and risking pedestrian's lives in order to ensure that they got parking spaces close to the door, pushing past each other in supermarket in their eagerness to get the best vegetables, then racing their carts to beat each other to the fastest cashier's line. I left, with only minimal groceries purchased, suffering a terrible case of culture shock. I'm still trying to get back up to United States speed.

Impressions of Costa Rica after a month's visit: Biodiversity

In Costa Rica biodiversity isn't a just a slogan or a buzzword, it is an observable fact. The country is teeming with life. We saw amazing numbers of birds, reptiles, insects and plants. Even when we weren't looking for them, the number and kinds of birds and insects that we saw just walking around rural towns was astonishing, and the variety we saw when we were hiking in the national parks was awe-inspiring. For example, on one short afternoon hike on Rincón de la Vieja I saw 2 species of toucans, 2 species of parrots, a laughing falcon, a cuckoo, a woodpecker, several kinds of finches, flycatchers, magpies and jays. That was just some of the birds. I also saw 2 bats, an agouti, a snake, several kinds of frogs and toads, several kinds of lizards, several kinds of ants including leaf cutter ants and army ants, and thousands of butterflies. I'm not much on plants, so I can't name many of the different trees I saw, but in the course of one afternoon I passed through at least 5 kinds of habitat: cloud forest, tropical rainforest, dry tropical forest, open savannah and what looked like California live oak highlands. I have done a lot of hiking in the United States, and I have never seen anything like it. As the guidebooks point out, there are more species of birds in Costa Rica (650) than in all of the United States and Canada combined. All of this in a country the size of West Virginia. If you like hiking and wildlife viewing, especially bird-watching, it is hard to imagine a better place. And if you are a fan of the writings of Charles Darwin, David Quammen and Edwin O. Wilson, as I am, it is a great place to see, in the flesh as it were, exactly what they were writing about.

Geodog is back from Costa Rica

We are back from our month in Costa Rica. We had a fabulous vacation. We learned a little Spanish, met some really nice people, and we had a great time living outdoors, hiking or swimming almost every day. In fact, we had so much fun that we didn't get around to doing all the research we had planned on housing costs, schools, employment opportunities, health care, and all the other details that would be involved in living there in the future. We just played. We also concluded that while we are definitely interested in going to Costa Rica to live for a year to two at some point in the near future, for now we are staying here in Berkeley.

I highly recommend Costa Rica in the summer to anyone looking for a moderately priced vacation with great hiking, great wildlife viewing, great adventures and really friendly people. If anyone is interested, I put a few of the 300+ photos I took up on the web at http://www.thebishop.net/gallery/CRHigh/. Email me for the password if you want to see photos with people in them. If you are interested in my impressions of Costa Rica and travel recommendations, I'll be posting a travel report of sorts here and at Geodog: Costa Rica over the next few days.

I plan to start writing here again, although I am going to try to avoid losing myself in politics again -- it takes up too much time, doesn't feel productive, and there seem to be plenty of people doing a good job exposing the lies of the Bush administration. Now it is time for me to restart the job/entrepreneurial opportunities hunt that I put on hold last spring. I am looking for anything that involves using my analytical, organizational, and people skills (see resume) to work with smart people on an interesting product or project, but I suspect that the easiest way to market myself is going to be as a Software Product/Project/Program manager. I'm hoping to find something in the East Bay or San Francisco, but I'm looking farther afield as well. If you know of any openings or of any interesting companies in the Bay Area that are hiring, feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email.

Geodog is back from Costa Rica

We are back from our month in Costa Rica. We had a fabulous vacation. We learned a little Spanish, met some really nice people, and we had a great time living outdoors, hiking or swimming almost every day. In fact, we had so much fun that we didn't get around to doing all the research we had planned on housing costs, schools, employment opportunities, health care, and all the other details that would be involved in living there in the future. We just played. We also concluded that while we are definitely interested in going to Costa Rica to live for a year to two at some point in the near future, for now we are staying here in Berkeley.

I highly recommend Costa Rica in the summer to anyone looking for a moderately priced vacation with great hiking, great wildlife viewing, great adventures and really friendly people. If anyone is interested, I put a few of the 300+ photos I took up on the web at http://www.thebishop.net/gallery/CRHigh/. Email me for the password if you want to see photos with people in them. If you are interested in my impressions of Costa Rica and travel recommendations, I'll be posting a travel report of sorts here and at Geodog: Costa Rica over the next few days.

I plan to start writing here again, although I am going to try to avoid losing myself in politics again -- it takes up too much time, doesn't feel productive, and there seem to be plenty of people doing a good job exposing the lies of the Bush administration. Now it is time for me to restart the job/entrepreneurial opportunities hunt that I put on hold last spring. I am looking for anything that involves using my analytical, organizational, and people skills (see resume) to work with smart people on an interesting product or project, but I suspect that the easiest way to market myself is going to be as a Software Product/Project/Program manager. I'm hoping to find something in the East Bay or San Francisco, but I'm looking farther afield as well. If you know of any openings or of any interesting companies in the Bay Area that are hiring, feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email.