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| When this sweet and friendly butcher at the Farmers Market spotted me with the camera, he willingly posed! The people of Costa Rica are approachable and warm. |
“Sightings from the Veranda in Costa Rica”
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| A breathtaking ridge of low-lying clouds. |
Two things are of most concern to us when there’s a power outage; one, that our food in the refrigerator and freezer will spoil, and two, the prospect of boredom at night in the dark.
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| Check out the size of those bananas! |
We can easily entertain ourselves during the day by playing cards, chatting, sunning and swimming in the pool. But, once darkness falls, life without power is daunting. Our phone batteries are usually dead by dark, and thus we’re unable to read online books, and our laptops may only have enough juice to watch one to two downloaded shows or one movie.
Last night would have been incredibly annoying in the dark had the power not come back on at 1:00 pm yesterday. As it turned out, my laptop, which contains all of the downloaded shows, was dead when I attempted to fire it up when the power returned.
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| Some vendors offered handmade crafts. |
Somehow, on Saturday night, the plug-in came loose, totally draining the battery. We wouldn’t have been able to watch a thing or…to transfer a show to Tom’s laptop. Thank goodness we got the power back yesterday.
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| These handmade shoes were beautifully made. |
In the realm of things, none of it’s a big deal. We could be like the folks dealing with floods and devastation after massive Hurricane Harvey over these past days. Who are we to complain?
Then again, with us humans, it’s all relative. We each live in our moment in time, and although we may feel empathy for those less fortunate, we do tend to get caught up in our own “dilemma of the moment.”
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| Handmade candles. |
Besides the 10-hour power outage on Sunday and the resulting lack of WiFi, which doesn’t work without power, the three sinks in the kitchen had begun leaking on Saturday night to the point where we can no longer use them. Julio is coming today to make the repairs.
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| These perfectly shaped tomatoes may have been imported, which we’ve discovered is not unusual at markets throughout the world. Instead, we purchase a big bag of uneven, less perfect tomatoes, as shown below. |
Luckily, we already had last night’s meal prepared, which required reheating the meat for our taco salads. No worries there. We’d have managed even without power when the gas range still worked, power or not.
On Saturday, when we went to Supremercade Coopeatenas, we waited at the outdoor cafe for the rental car #1 guy to pick up the car at 10:00 am after our five-day rental. (This morning at 8:30 am, taxi driver Henry picks us up to get rental car #2 near the San Jose airport).
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| These are the tomatoes we purchased. |
While we waited, we met a lovely couple Pat and Jim, from the US, who owns a home nearby but happen to be returning to the US this week for an extended stay. Gosh, it was fun chatting with them. Their five years of experience living in Atenas were helpful to us.
They even followed us into the market to show us where to find whole cream and unsweetened coconut milk. Yeah! The cream wasn’t located in a refrigerator section but instead was on a dry shelf in a shelf-stable container. The coconut milk was situated in the liquor section near the rum. Oh, I get it. In three and a half months, we’d never have found those two much-needed items.
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There are many apple orchards in the area.
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While checking out, we met another lovely person, Sarah, who wrote down her phone number and whom we’ll call for a get-together in a few weeks. Her husband had just had surgery and needed a few weeks to recover before socializing. Most certainly, we’ll make contact.
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| Gorgeous flowers for that special occasion. |
After the visits with the ex-pats, we purchased several kilos of organic chicken breasts and pork chops when the market was having its special Saturday sale. We filled our insulated bags to the brim, grabbed a taxi in front of the market, and were back to our villa a little after midnight.
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| We purchased six heads of this lettuce for our big daily salads. |
With no car over the weekend until we pick up the rental this morning, we felt a bit stranded on Sunday, exacerbated by the lack of electricity. If we’d had wheels, we could have gone into town to buy bags of ice to keep the food cold.
Instead, we dumped all the ice from the ice maker into a large cooler and added all the perishables from the refrigerator. Everything survived, and the frozen meats in the freezer stayed frozen.
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| More locally grown fruit. |
I’d prepared a short post yesterday to inform our readers that we weren’t able to post. I’d considered doing the post in the afternoon. Still, after changing my usual morning posting routine, I decided against it and took the rest to re-organize after the power outage and get caught up on a few tasks.
Now that we’ll have a car, we have many exciting tours on the horizon. Please stay in touch as we continue to share them with all of you.
Have a wonderful day!
Photo from one year ago today, August 28, 2016:
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| The elaborate sign at the entrance to the Muay Thai Kickboxing facility down the road from us. Many nights we can hear the activity. For more photos, please click here. |