Hello from Monteverde, Costa Rica

Hello from Monteverde, Costa Rica! The Stancil's have arrived and moved into our new town. Everyone here is very nice and everyone has been really helpful in getting us aquainted with our new surroundings.

Our house is a little bit more rustic than we had hoped but it is certainly safe, dry and liveable. We've now been in town for almost two weeks and we're really starting to fall into a routine. Hayley and Jack are at school each day. The biodiesel bus picks them up at 0720 and drops them off around 3:15 PM. Cindy spends all day preparing meals and aquiring foodstuffs from local vendors. Jason doesn't do much of anything except lay around in the hammock and play Jack and Hayley's Nintendo DS. Just kidding.

So here is a picture of Hayley in our Cocina (kitchen). The biggest challenge of living in Monteverde is keeping insects out of the house. It is a losing battle most of the time. The house is not well sealed up and most of the day the temperature outside is perfect and you wish to keep the doors wide open. There are approximately 30,000 species of insects in Costa Rica and they are still discovering more. We've found probably hundreds of different species just in our kitchen. But we are overcoming this challenge with some chemistry by just spraying down all openings with a type of fumigant. It seems to be improving the situation.

The big surprise of our stay so far here in Monteverde is just how busy we stay all the time. Simple tasks normally take a little longer here than back home. And a great portion of each day is spent just walking from one place to another. Jason is taking a Spanish Class. We're all taking Salsa and ChaCha dancing lessons. Cindy is going to be volunteering at the school.

The kids seem to like their school pretty well. We'll share pictures of their school experiences soon. Unfortunately we just haven't taken our camera up there yet. The campus is very large and very green. When the clouds clear, the children have beautiful views all the way down to the Pacific.

Sorry it took us so long to make our first post and we promise to update it more frequently.

Here is a picture of Jack with our cat that we inherited with our house. We call the cat "Haynie". The cat lives in our laundry room and has open access and egress at all hours. We've never really liked cats all that much but this one is tough to resist.

So here is a picture of our house. Locals call it the Casa de Isa Mora, Masogista de Monteverde. Our address is in literal translation, "the house 200 meters east of the Cascade Discotech." We like to call it the "Choza de Amor" or the Love Shack.