Moving To Costa Rica: Day 2

DAY 2 Nov 31

The 2nd day started late because we had only slept maybe 3 hours in the last 36 hours - no kidding - due to having to be completely OUT of our apartment the day we were leaving. As it turns out this was a much more time consuming job than we thought and it went down to the wire and as a result we couldn't sleep but had to just keep throwing stuff out, cleaning and packing during our last day in the United States of America. (See our post on the ordeal of moving out of our apartment, packing everything we needed/wanted into half a dozen duffel bags, and moving to Costa Rica without a shipping container, to save money.)

So anyway, we slept a fairly long time on our first night in Costa Rica and got up a bit later than we'd planned.

Then finally when we got going, we had to go around getting my prepaid phone plan recharged with more minutes because the first day they only put the minimum and they didn't have any more to sell me. (That's Costa Rica businesses for ya! You can charge up to $20 at a time but no store we went to had more than $5 worth to sell us.)

So most of this 2nd day was spent running errands like this... Running around a new (to you) town in Costa Rica to get something simple like a SIM card and pre-paid minutes for your phone might come easy ... or it might not. In our case it required us to go to about 6 stores and took about 2 hours to accomplish what could have theoretically been done in about 10 minutes.

Finally, towards the end of the day we looked at a car for sale that a friend had lined up for us: a 1992 Suzuki Sidekick 4x4 recommended by a friend's wife, a friend or conocido of hers was selling, which was in amazingly good shape physically for its age (new interior, new tires, good appearance, BUT had squealing brakes and an extremely stiff clutch. Otherwise it drove well but I couldn't see driving anything with such a stiff clutch. Maybe it would get better, I don't know but in any case 1992 seems awfully old for $7,000, even in Costa Rica where all cars have about 30-40% taxes added to them for importing into Costa Rica.

This was our first real indication that buying a good used car in the San Ramon area (probably anywhere in Costa Rica) was going to be not just a challenge but one of our biggest challenges.

By this time it was getting dark and we headed home.

One thing about Costa Rica is that it gets dark every day, all year long, around 6pm and if you live out on a dirt road you'd best head home before the darkness, fog and/or rain make your drive home dangerous. Been there, done that. Trying to avoid it!

READ ABOUT OUR THIRD DAY OF OUR "MOVING TO COSTA RICA" SAGA HERE