San Jose again

Sarah: Well we made it back from San Jose. Let me recap our trip. We got in fairly early on Wednesday and did some shopping with Dennis that he wanted to do before returning to the states, and then we made it out to PriceSmart (like Costco) to do some shopping ourselves too. I also need to mention that we now can stay at the sabbatical house that LASP owns anytime we come into the city. So, we enjoyed a free place to stay this time, and we really liked being so close to the LASP office.

Thursday was our day of errands. We had a long list of items to buy again, so we made the rounds to our normal places—a home store, a hardware store, and some random places downtown. We were even able to do some Christmas/birthday shopping! It was a joy to ride busses and taxis all over the city—always a cultural experience. We even made a stop to the National Museum to talk to a guy in the herbarium. There is a tree here in the valley that the quetzals are eating right now, and no one knows what kind of tree it is. There are only 2 trees in the valley of this species. David identified the genus and we went looking for help with the species. This statue was just built in San Jose about a couple months ago, and we saw many, many ticos stopping to take pictures of it.

Since we got most of our errands done on Thursday, Friday and Saturday was spent with people. Friday we went to the doctor. As many of you know, David was diagnosed with thyroiditis before we came down here to Costa Rica. Because of that, he’s not on medication but needs to get blood tests done every 6-8 weeks. The doctor that we saw is also the one that QERC has been using for a number of years, so we set up an appointment to chat with him and also to get David checked up. The doc sounded positive about David, and we’ll get the results of the blood tests in the next few weeks. For lunch we met Anthony Chamberlain (director of LASP). It was intended to be a casual get-to-know you lunch, since we don’t know him well, but we ended up talking about business for the most part. It was great to spend time with him and bounce ideas off him. We went to the University of Costa Rica (UCR) in the afternoon to meet with a professor who is looking to do some research here at QERC in the spring. It was exciting to get to know him and hear of his hopeful plans—he is waiting to see if he has received some grant money to do the research here, which would be catching quetzals and DNA testing them. He would also possibly put radio trackers on them to figure out their migrating habits. Finally on Friday night, we went to have dinner with David’s Costa Rican family. His sister Sophia had her boyfriend and another friend over to eat with us as well. The boyfriend, Pablo, was someone David knew and really liked while he studied here. They were all about our age, so it was fun to eat with them and share a lot of laughter. They will be fun to get together with in the future! It was great to have David’s tican mom cook for us too—she’s a professional chef.

Saturday we went to InBio, a National Biodiversity Institute. It had animal displays (a butterfly garden, snake tanks, frog tanks, etc.), and paths to walk through examples of the different ecosystems found here in Costa Rica. It was beautiful and we saw lots of neat wildlife—both in cages and in the wild (like this wild spider)! And Saturday evening we went out with Luis and Gabi, the couple that was out here at QERC a few weeks ago and who helps us out a lot with business and simple Costa Rican questions. We went to the bookstore where Gabi works, and then went to the mall to do some Christmas shopping with them. We ended the evening by going to a movie, which was a real treat. (We saw The Guardian, a very good movie.)

Sunday we got up and packed up and took off…driving a car! Anthony actually has a car that he’s fixing up and getting ready to sell soon, so while they have an extra car they are letting us borrow one of theirs for a cheap price for November and December. We are extremely grateful! After stopping at our Hipermas to do our monthly grocery shopping, we made it back safely to our home in the valley. We now have plenty of work to do, after a few key purchases and with some items that Dennis brought down and are excited to get back to work.