Back to everyday living

The number of "gringos" seem to be growing in these parts and they are all more than willing to share tips, tricks and "insider information" on the art - and ease - of "everyday living" here.

Thanks to information we have garnered from several friends, we now have a local bank account which allows us to pay our bills online from anywhere there is internet access. And, speaking of the internet, we have discovered, finally, how to use dial-up internet from our home telephone with no additional "service provider." We have also gotten a local post office box to make it easier for family and friends to send us things from the US (hint, hint). We've just gotten connected to the municipal water system (we also did this in Arizona right before we left and the comparison between the cost and the process is VERY interesting). And lastly, we have shipped a car from the US to Costa Rica.

Following are details, links and "how tos" for accomplishing these tasks. We are not quite done with "shipping the car" so that story will come soon - I am hoping later this week!

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.