I heart foreign grocery stores!

Among other things, I really do love foreign grocery stores.  And here in Monteverde we finally got to go to one!  Beyond the fact that you can feed yourself for so darn little (and in a tasty fashion at that... more on that in a minute), there are amazing products that vary immensely from country to country.  Some of my faves here:  Coco Krispies here have a mascot named Melvin the Elephant. You can get Tang here in like 20 flavors.  There is a rice aisle the size of an American cereal aisle, there are like 25 different kinds and sizes, one even comes with free hot sauce!  We went yesterday because we were planning to spend most of today at the Monteverde Cloud Forest.  So we bought some stuff for breakfast, and provisions for lunch.  We decided to go for a Central American version of the infamous Hopputtle Sandwich.  The Hopputtle was created a few years ago when my friend Erin (Hoppe... hence Hopputtle) and I travelled in Europe.  We would get a bagutte, some salami, some cheese and sometimes a can of Heinz beans with a pop top, and there you had it, lunch on the go!  Today we had mini tortillas, local Monteverde cheese (they have a famous cheese factory here, started by the Quakers who founded the town) and the kicker, black refried beans in a pouch.  Delish.  We spent the day in the Cloud Forest, where we didn't see a ton of animals, but we did get to see a really lovely Quetzal, the national bird of Costa Rica and our guide was really informative about the forest and it's biology. Yesterday we did a tour of a local coffee coop, maybe I can convince Mike to tell you about it later.  We ended our afternoon by walking back to our hostel (6 km! We're proud of ourselves) with a short stop for milkshakes at the Monteverde Cheese Factory on the way. Tomorrow, zip lines and hanging bridges! 

We had to wear jackets!

Just a quick check in.  Today was mostly a travel day, but we made it here safe and sound.  And saw amazing rainbows from the bus, they were gorgeous, we will send pictures soon. But we got here and it is chilly tonight! We wore shoes! And fleeces!  We're hoping for nice weather tomorrow to do a coffee tour and a night hike.  Lots o' love, Debbie & Mike

Also, interesting note.... it appears that in order to live in Costa Rica, it is mandatory to have both a dog and a hammock... food for thought.

Goodbye beaches, hello cloud forest!

Tomorrow we will spend the day travelling from Montezuma to Monteverde (or more specifically, Santa Elena). This will entail a bus, then a ferry, then a bus, should be fun. Just wanted to fill you all in on the last few days (minus the amazing political moment of yesterday!). Most days here consisted of breakfast (generally including eggs, gallo pinto & a batido(delicious fruit smoothie, pineapple is mike's fave), followed by hammock reading/nap time, followed by a walk in to town for lunch & provisions (water, rum&coke in a can, etc.) followed by reading/napping, followed by a dip in the cute little tidepool in front of the hotel where you can watch all the little crabs run around, then back to town for a leisurely dinner. It's not a bad life really... The other day we did hike out to the waterfalls (the trail happened to start right across the street from the hotel), and though the guidebook calls it a hike, much more of it is a rock scramble, often through water... we felt super accomplished until we saw a bunch of children doing it... but I swear it was at least a little hardcore.  Yesterday instead of the norm, we went out on a snorkeling trip to Isle Tortuga. The weather looked like it might be dodgy, but no, it cleared right up, and minus a little choppiness it was all good. Also, note to my fam. there was a Canadian guy on our boat who looked soooo much like Shawn Raviv, I kept wanting to talk to him like I knew him, and then I was like, no, stop being crazy. In any event, the snorkeling was decent, we got to play in lots of schools of fish, saw a cool looking blue-spotted Ray(see approximated picture) and a few needle-nosed fish and only got moderately sunburned... On to Monteverde, where I have promised to buy Mike a coffee milkshake at the Monteverde Cheese Factory.

When life and work collide...

Earlier this year one of my clients, the Center for Independent Media, a non-profit organization that operates a network of online political news sites, broke a bizarre story about an aide to former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo pleading guilty to "karate chopping" an African American woman in the head and calling her a racial epithet. The story was particularly interesting at the time given Tancredo's contemperaneous allegation that then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was racist.

Fast forward to today. Debbie and I took a full-day boat tour out to Isla Tortuga in the Gulf of Nicoya, replete with snorkeling, sunbathing, and a delicious BBQ fish lunch on the beach. On the boat ride out to the island I was talking to the guy next to me, who I recognized from our hotel, and learned that he runs a small political consulting shop in Virginia. A funny enough coincidence, I thought. Although I hesitated, I asked whether he worked for Democrats or Republicans, and he said Republicans. Fine, no problem. We're in Costa Rica, I'm on a 9-month vacation, I can deal. We talked a bit about my work and he asked what kind of clients I worked for. I, in turn, asked the same. When he mentioned Tom Tancredo as a former client (and Pat Buchanan as a current one), it suddenly clicked that this might in fact be the karate chop guy. When I learned his name was Marcus, I was even more certain, as he began to look familiar to me and the name definitely sounded familiar. So, sure enough, we get off the boat, get back to the hotel, open up our Netbook, Google "Tancredo aide karate" and find that we spent the afternoon and are sharing a hotel with a seriously anti-immigration conservative activist. Faaantastic.

Boy vacation is interesting!

And now what you've all been waiting for... Pictures!

Here are a couple of highlights, you can reach the whole album by clicking on the slideshow on the sidebar... pay no attention to the myriad pics of the same thing... we like to have choices...

Here's Mike tasting a starfruit right off the tree at Ricky & Flor's

Here are our lovely hosts!

chillin' at Manuel Antonio Beach

Monkey... looking kinda angry  and below our Jet Boat... before the jetting part...

Debbie in a hammock in Montezuma.. life is so tough... and then we hiked to a waterfall!

Blog Extra! Reading List!

Part of this trip is also about both of us getting to relax and READ... you know, shake off some of the modern distractions (email...just kidding, totally email us!) and settle in.  So we are going to post what we have been reading on a relatively ongoing basis:

Debbie:
1."Belong to Me" by Marissa de los Santos, given to me by my sister the day before the trip.  It was such a lovely piece of fiction. I would recommend it to all.
2. "Basket Case" by Carl Hiaasen a typical Hiaasen novel set in South Florida with dumb criminals, but more amusing than some of his works.
3. "Interview with a Vampire" by Anne Rice.  I'll finish it in about an hour, it's fun, something I've always meant to read, and definitely better than the movie, although I can't help but imagine Tom Cruise & Brad Pitt as the main characters :)

Mike:
1. "Damascus Gate" by Robert Stone.  He can give you his comments when he finishes tomorrow.

Mike's First Post!

So, this is Mike...and this is my first post on this blog! The last time I really blogged it was when we moved to LA and I was working from home...and the blog was appropriately named "Mike on the Couch," which really is where I worked for the first year we lived in LA. Anyway, I'm not as witty as Debbie but I will try to give you a brief and enjoyable overview of the last few days. As Debbie said, our brief visit with Ricky and Flor was really nice. They were really generous hosts, and we had a truly relaxing time (most of which was spent reading in the hammock on the screened-in deck attached to our room). And unlike my aunt and uncle, we did not encounter any massive spiders or scorpions. We did, however, experience a very brief earthquake on Friday just before departing their place for Jaco, which was a little jarring (pardon the pun). Flor then drove us into Jaco, where we picked up the bus to Quepos, the main town up the road from Manuel Antonio Village. A brief note about the buses in Costa Rica (based on the few we've taken so far): they're extraordinarily cheap (it cost us about $4.50 to get to Quepos, as opposed to $50-80 by private shuttle), they're modern coach buses, and it's pretty easy to tell which bus is which, as they're all labeled with the departure and destination locations. Interestingly, each bus route also has a different type of bus, leading us to wonder whether each route is controlled by a different company. Maybe Debbie Lyons can enlighten us on this point. The only downsides of bus travel are the mild inconvenience of having to work around their schedule (which they don't even stick that closely to sometimes), the lack of air conditioning (though the breeze just about makes up for it), and the slight discomfort I have with having to put my bag under the bus, where I can only hope it won't get stolen. Of course, I've been chosing the seats right above the luggage bays just to be on the safe side... Okay, so we got to Quepos on Friday, then took a taxi to our hotel, Costa Verde, just outside of Manuel Antonio Village. After checking in we enjoyed a sandwich and some relaxation at the pool, overlooking the ocean, and finished the day with a seafood dinner in town. Now, by the following morning we still hadn't seen any monkeys and were kind of upset about it (the hotel bills itself as having "more monkeys than people"). So we kindly asked the dude at the front desk where the monkeys were, at which point he pointed into the trees and said "there are some monkeys" (there were!) and then to the street, where a monkey was running up the road. Debbie thought the guy was making fun of us, but you can't really predict when a monkey is just going to be bounding up the road, so I think he was as into it as we were. We then walked to Manuel Antonio park, waited on a long line, didn't hire a guide (my sister rightly suggested we not), and proceeded down the main path, where we saw numerous monkeys in the trees (you can always tell where they are because there are hordes of people clustered around pointing). The path took us to Manuel Antonio beach, a really calm, pristine beach at which I swam and Debbie (who was not in a bathing suit) rested in the shade and took funny pictures of me. We had snacks on the beach while we watched sand crabs move all around us, then we headed back to the trail along the beach, where we encountered...monkeys! Close up! Lots of them. They were sort of posing for pictures and what not, just kind of hanging around. Very cool. After taking a bunch of pictures, we went on a decently strenuous (read: uphill) hike to a vista spot, which was really nice. We left the park by way of the old entrance, which requires you to cross an estuary...a funny thing for a national park visited by hundreds of people each day. Many tourists now go across in boats, but we were rugged and just waded through (the water never even reached our knees). For dinner we went to a place called El Avion, which is a restaurant and night club built around one of the airplanes purchased by the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s and abandoned in Costa Rica when the Iran-Contra scandal broke. Good food and a great sunset! I feel like this post is going on forever and I haven't really said anything funny, so I'll wind down...Sunday we took the bus back to Jaco and then caught a jet boat to Montezuma, which was awesome...to get on the boat you have to first get on a smaller transport boat that literally picks you up at the beach (we waded out), and which, in our case, was driven by a 9-year-old kid. Then we zoomed across the gulf to Montezuma, where we similarly exited in the water at the beach. Super cool. Now we're at Hotel Amor de Mar, a quaint little beachfront hotel with a beautiful lawn and lots of hammocks. The plan: relax, relax, relax. Oh, and start thinking about what the heck we're going to do on the rest of this trip...

Looks like we made it!

Hey folks!  We did indeed make it to Costa Rica, sorry, we haven't had internet access (but here at Hotel Amor de Mar there is free wifi, what what!). I'll start at the very begining, I've heard it's a very good place to start... But I am a little sleepy, so I'm going to break this in to a few posts, we're here for 5 days, so I'm sure we'll even get in pictures!  Anywho, we made it without incident to the airport, and to Miami, from there we got on our next plane which was an hour delayed (partially due to 'a need to shift cargo'?), we were a little concerned that Ricky would have trouble finding us and we knew he was coming from far away.  But after a short incident with the immigration lady who had no idea where Ricky's mountain get-away was and thought we made up a fake address, we made it outside where Ricky found us in about a minute (because he said Mike looks enough like Mort to spot anywhere :)  We got to go on some fun errands about town with Ricky (we picked up a pinata for their grandson's 10th birthday, as well as some livestock feed... more on that later), then we headed up to their amazing mountain retreat.  I'm sure they wouldn't call it that, but that's what it is. It's lovely, they grow a ton of their own food, they have tons of fruit trees (Mike tried a starfruit right off the tree! I have a picture!!), they raise turkeys and chickens, Flor makes all of her own fresh juices... it was awesome.  We were there for two days and they ruled.

Tomorrow... Costa Rican buses, Manuel Antonio and Monkeys!

It's our last day in the US of A!

Tomorrow morning at crazy early time (aka like 4 am) we start our journey! I've got a bit of a cold (thanks Zachary & Sarah) but I'm convincing myself that the Costa Rican beach will fix anything. Today we'll finish up our last couple of errands, pry Mike's blackberry out of his hands and do our final pack. I think we have just about everything we need, and if we don't, we have LA and I'm pretty sure there are also stores in the world.  After all this planning it's pretty crazy to actually be going on this trip!

We are goin' to China!

There are only 3 countries that we are going to that you can't just get a visa in the airport or pay an exit fee when you leave.  They are Australia, Vietnam and China.  Australia just charged us like $18 online and it's no biggie. Vietnam you can get pretty easily on the road, and we're still outside the 6 month window so we can't get it yet, but China we figured we could take care of.  So today we went back to the Chinese consulate to get our passports (dropped them off on Thursday), and although Mike was pretty sure that they were going to keep them and interrogate him for being a 'non-profit fundraiser', they decided to let both him and 'unemployed' me into their country.  Must be because we are polite, or because we gave them $260.  Makes you wish we were on better terms with them... Oh well, we got pretty visas with a little picture of the Great Wall, and we get to go to CHINA!

What to pack...

I know a lot of you have questions about what one brings on a trip like this, so here goes:
We put it all in Osprey Wayfarer Backpacks (one for boys, one for girls... as previously discussed)
Underwear: 5-7 pairs (more than you're supposed to, but I can't compromise on underwear), Debbie also has 3 bras (Mike for obvi reasons, does not). We each have long underwear just in case.
Socks: 3 pair
Pants: 3 pair each (one jeans, two travel)
Skirts: Debbie has 1 travel skirt and one travel dress (Thanks Patagonia Veteran's Day Sale!)
Shirts: 5ish each (we haven't quite picked them, I'll update you on that one)
Outerwear: We each have a light fleece and a windbreaker/raincoat.
Shoes: 3 pair each.  Keen Light Hikers, Water Sandals(Mike has Tevas, Debbie has Chacos) and a pair of flippy floppies.
Misc: We each have a sun hat, a warm hat, bathing suit, gloves, belt and a bandana

Non-clothes:
Nook! (Barnes & Nobel E-reader)
Deck of cards
5 dice (for Yahtzee & cosmic wimpout... it's possible that I have all the rules/scoring of both in my travel journal)
Immersion Coil (for boiling/sterilizing water... good for moderately sketchy water and a good cup of tea)
Travel Towels
Travel pillows (they are amazing, they are made of tiny cubes of memory foam that puff up!)
Sheet liners
Journals + Pens
Couple of legit books for trading
Camera + camera bits
Mosquito net (ask Mike....)
Glasses
Headlamps (for reading and awesomeness)
Sporks
Universal plug
Clothesline
Ipod nanos of two generations (red and blue we are soooo patriotic)
Phone
netbook (another Mike carry :)
Assorted toiletries

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, but typing it out, now it seems like a lot!  Most of it tiny and very reuseable. We'll let you know how things work out.

Looks like this thing might actually happen!

After two weeks of amazing family time with both of our families, capped off with a lovely party in Little Italy (complete with amazing Congratulations Debbie & Mike banner) we are finally focusing on getting ready (which is good because we leave in 13 days!). Yesterday we went to the Chinese Consulate and applied for visas, which provided it works out, was very uncomplicated.  Then we headed to EMS (east coast REI) and spent a ton o' money on a bunch of things we needed, then headed over to the Berkowitz abode where we spent some solid internet time figuring out our phone needs (I think we have settled on a combo of international SIM card and VoxOx a cool system where we send them a text, and then your phone rings and our phone rings and we pay local charges), our travel insurance (we went with World Nomads the largest/most worldwide group, if you're bored check out their 'claim stories' some are really funny like, 'I tried to pet a lion cub and it bit me and i got stitches... claim denied dumbass), and checked out some other stuff. We've also figured out a ride from the airport in Costa Rica (Yay Ricky!) and a couple of people to stay with in various locales, it's really coming together!  Still some things to do, but don't worry, Mike has a to do list :)