Time to get mail

I could count on 1 hand (possibly 1 finger) the amount of mail we have received over the last 3 years in Costa Rica. You see, no one sends you a bill here. You should already KNOW about the time of month/year that your phone bill, electric bill, property tax, car registration and insurance are due. No one sends this information to you, and you don't send them back any money. You go to the bank or other payment station and pay these things when they are due. Simple. Everybody knows. Everybody does it. We have also not encouraged any family or friends to write to us. There are no street addresses. The Spanish word for address is "direction." And it is indeed the directions how to find your house. In our case we are so many meters past a church and we have a green house. We also told the post office whose house this used to be to insure delivery. All that is history now. We just got a post office box (or apartado in Spanish) in town. It required an easy application, copy of our passports and about $16 for the year. Now to insure that we recieve mail we have subscribed to the Tico Times, an weekly English paper. It's been 2 weeks already and neither of the weeklies has shown up yet. Hmmm.