It was an interesting question that led me to ponder
another: What exactly is normal? And how long does one have to live in a
certain place to achieve normalcy? In Alaska, normal was walking out our cabin
door to find a moose sleeping next to the car. Here normal is finding a snake
in our house, killing cockroaches daily and accidentally flooding our own
apartment.
As strange as it may seem, the stories we’ve accumulated lately
have become part of normal life around here. So normal, actually, that they didn’t
initially seem interesting enough to blog about, but we realize now that some
of the things we’ve grown accustomed to may actually seem a little… well…
exotic to people back home. So folks, this blog is dedicated to all the little stuff
that we call life in Costa Rica.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
We found another snake — our third in less than a year — in
the apartment a few weeks ago. We’re still not sure what kind of snake it was,
or if it was poisonous. We described it to our host sister, Karen, and she told
us it was totally harmless. Then we described it to a friend who told us it was
extremely venomous. We knew one thing, however: get rid of it ASAP.
Instincts kicked in immediately and
I raced for the broom after I heard Megon yell, “Snake in the house! Snake in
the house!” I tried to shoo the beast out with the broom end, but it was small
enough to hide in the bristles. Concerned because I’d lost visual contact, I
tried shaking the broom outside but couldn’t see anything (it was too dark
outside). Megon used the headlamp to take a look, but we still couldn’t find
it. To this day we wonder if that snake is still creeping around our apartment.
THE DOG HOUSE
We have officially declared ourselves Costa Rican dog
owners. Yes … plural! Rosco (who also goes by Pumpkin) and Sirius (whose full
name is Sirius Black). They’re both a couple of street dogs that scored a home
with a pair of friendly gringos.
Rosco came to us scared of everything that moved. He
wouldn’t come anywhere near us, and he was especially afraid of brooms. Now we
can hardly get him out of the apartment. His favorite place to chill is under
one of our armchairs. He’s so tiny he can be sleeping under it without anyone
noticing.
One week we had to stay in San José for a few nights. Just
before bed that first night, it dawned on me that we didn’t check for Rosco
underneath the chair before locking up the apartment. We immediately called our
host family and asked if they had seen him. They hadn’t noticed him at all. “Oh
my God!” we thought. “He’s probably starving to death!” Thankfully our host
mom, Nidia, had a spare key and checked to see that he in fact wasn’t in the apartment.
And Sirius, well, he came to our
doorstep an extremely malnourished puppy. Seriously. He was nothing but skin
and bones. Now he and Rosco have become friends and have developed some
favorite pastimes: taking long naps in our doorway, barking at cows on the
loose, terrorizing the local squirrel, and roaming the streets at night to chase
down bikers, motorcycles and cars.
One night both Rosco and Sirius woke up Megon around 3 a.m.
with a bark unlike most other barks. Megon knew something was wrong, so she
grabbed her glasses and the headlamp and looked outside only to find both of
them with mouthfuls of quills. I was in San José that night, so Megon called
our host dad, Norman, for help. There were just too many quills — about 20 in
each mouth. For the next hour, Megon held each dog one at a time while Norman
pulled the quills out one by one.
THE COCKROACH HUNTER
They say Peace Corps changes you and they are right. Since
coming to La Rambla, we have become master cockroach hunters. We have found
those disgusting buggers everywhere: in the shower, in the kitchen sink, on my
toothbrush, on our kitchen sponge, and — brace yourself — on our bathroom
towels!
Nothing is worse than grabbing your towel after an ice cold
shower only to have a cockroach flutter it’s nasty wings in your face. Megon
lucked out the other day when I found a Goliath-sized roach on her towel hanging
in the spare bedroom before she used it to dry off.
Every night we do our nightly cockroach maintenance routine:
plug the three sink drains, cover the shower drain, put the dishes and
silverware away in the cockroach-free cupboard, make sure all surfaces are
crumb free.
Lately we’ve had a mysterious cockroach hunter who hunts in
a peculiar place: on our toilet seat. We wake up each morning to find massive
cockroach carnage on the seat. So weird, but we’ll take all the help we can
get.
THE BROKEN TOILET
Speaking of the toilet … I broke my first toilet the other
week. And when I say break, I really mean break. The tank had trouble filling
one day so I took the lid off to fix it. Well, I fixed it all right. The heavy
porcelain lid slipped out of my hands and it cracked the porcelain tank. It was
only a little crack at first, but then it grew and before we knew it, the
bathroom floor was covered in (clean) toilet water.
We had plans to leave town for the weekend, so Megon grabbed
Norman to ask him if he thought it could be fixed while we were gone. He said
it was an easy superglue fix and he’d get to it sometime over the weekend. We
left the house with the plug up so the tank wouldn’t fill, but apparently it
wasn’t that secure. We got a phone call from Nidia two days later saying our
entire apartment was flooded in toilet water!
Luckily we didn’t have much lying on the floor other than a
box of magazines, recyclables, and our shoe collection. By the time we got home
the floor was mostly dry thanks to Nidia’s hard work and Mother Nature. None of
the magazines nor the recyclables survived. In fact, the flooding was a
blessing in disguise because we discovered that the corner of our spare bedroom
that held boxes full of recyclables was a breeding ground for a colony of
termites.
Now that the toilet’s fixed, the termites are gone and the
floor is 100% dry, we’ve returned to what we’ve come to know as “normal” life.
Comments