House Tour – Kitchen (La Cocina)

Part 5 in a series on our apartment in San Jose.

Above: The kitchen.

Our most frequented part of the house is also our biggest reminder that we no longer live in the United States.

First the good. Our kitchen has been great, it is much bigger than many of the other kitchens in Costa Rica. It has lots of cabinets, good counter space, and a big, hot stove. Our microwave works great, our fridge is always cold, and the freezer never frosts over like some others.

Now what is interesting about out kitchen is how much time we have to spend in it because of a lack of appliances. The most glaring omissions are the dishwasher and clothes dryer, while others include a garbage disposal and an ice maker. We never quite realized how much time and energy these things save until now.

Some things of note:
– You can see a small blue stickie note on one of the cabinets, it has the Spanish word for “cabinet” on it. We’ve tried this throughout our house to learn the Spanish words, though by now most of the stickies have blown off.

– On the corner of one of the counters is all of our sweets. Interestingly, almost all the foods here go bad very quickly, so we have to keep all perishables sealed in Ziploc bags.

– Lastly, you’ll notice the blender on the left, with which we love to make fresh pineapple smoothies!

The above picture is from our kitchen looking out on our laundry room/patio. The first thing that jumps out from the picture is that there is no door. Our kitchen leads straight out onto our patio area with nothing between inside and outside but a few iron bars. When we moved in we were assured that this was normal, though we have yet to meet anyone else with such an arrangement, or meet a Tico who thinks it is infact normal. And yet despite the apparent oddity, we have come to enjoy our “open” kitchen. We always have a great breeze, our house stays cool, and our clothes dry quick while staying dryer.

All in all we have really come to enjoy our kitchen, especially our open windows!

House Tour – Living Room (La Sala)

Part 4 in a series on our apartment in San Jose.

Above: Our simple living room.

We call this our living room, but it is also our dining room, TV-watching room, foyer, study room, and many other things. We have two chairs, a small table with chairs, a TV stand, and two chairs zip-tied together with a sheet thrown on top that we loving call a “couch.”

Things of interest:

– You can see two phones above Lindsey’s head, one is our Costa Rica line, and the other goes to our gate outside. With these two phones and our Vonage line, it can get pretty confusing when the phone rings

– Lucy is not wearing any pants, as usual in her post-nap state.

– Our apartment came with a TV and cable. We get about 10 English channels: Fox, HBO, Cinemax, a couple news channels, Cooking channel, and HGTV. We get ESPN, but all in Spanish and mostly showing only futbol (soccer). At any point during the day, there are probable 4-6 futbol games on TV! Unfortunately, we don’t get The Office here, but we’re still holding out hope that 24 will be shown on Fox in English.

– With the table, the door, and all the foot traffic, this room gets pretty dirty pretty fast, so it is by far the most swept/mopped room in the house.

Here is another picture of the room, from above the table. You can see Lucy’s little chair and map/placement. This is where she eats all her meals, while the brown chair in the background (the one with all the crackers) is her chair where she loves to eat her snacks. Her Pato (stuffed duck) and her blankie also join her for a snack after her nap.

In the background, the door on the right is Lucy’s room, and on the left is the kitchen. Even though Lucy’s room is right behind the living room, she has never woken up at night, no matter how many people we have over and how loud they are. She is such an awesome sleeper.

Hope you enjoy, the kitchen tour is coming soon!

House Tour – Bathroom

Part 3 in a series on our apartment in San Jose.

Above: Our bathroom with Lucy’s “tub” in the middle of the shower.

Our only bath room lies just off our bedroom. It is all pink tile, no shelving, and open windows like the rest of the house. Some interesting features include:

– Obviously the tupper-ware tub (pictured below in use).

– A hot water shower. Almost all showers in Costa Rica don’t have hot water, but instead have “widow-makers.” A “widow-maker” is a little heater that sits on top of the shower head and heats up the water right before it comes out. It works sparingly, and as you can tell by the name, isn’t the safest contraception in the world. Our landlord added a water heater to our apartment, which we love and use continually.

– Oddly, the bathroom came without a mirror, medicine cabinet, towel rack, or any shelves to speak of, so we’ve had to make do.

(Funny story about the shelves. One night, after some neighbors had had some things stolen off their deck, we heard a massive crashing in the middle of the night. Assuming the worst (someone breaking through our window), I jumped up and ran yelling like a mad man into the living room and then straight into Lucy’s room, ready to clobber with my bare hands any possible intruder. Fortunately, no one was there. After our nerves finally settled down, we searched the house for what could have made such a terrible crashing, and found it was our make-shift shelf in the bathroom. That red, blue, and green canvas thing in the picture is our shelf. It was filled with soap, razors, lotion, medicine, etc., and when it broke off the hook, everything came crashing down on the tile, making the horrible and terrifying racket. Not to worry, we have reinstalled the shelves with reinforced hooks and have assured ourselves that it will never happen again.)

Lucy seems to enjoy her baths, of course she probably has no idea what she is missing. We have tried to shower with her once or twice (which is how Tico’s bathe their children), but she doesn’t seem to like it very much. For now this is the best solution, as long as she doesn’t grow any more!

House Tour – Office

Part 2 in a series on our apartment in San Jose.

Above: Our office, as seen from the doorway in our bedroom.

When we first saw pictures of our apartment, there was an odd room off our bedroom that no one quite knew what to do with. Too small to be a bed room, yet too big to be a closet, and our landlord suggested we use it as a TV room (?)

After searching for weeks for a desk, which we found at PriceMart (think Sam’s Club), we finally started to use our room as the office. As you can see, it consist of a desk, a chair, and a bunch of wires.

– In the foreground on the left are two lonely shelves, one for books and the other for random stuff (like the top of your dresser.)
– As you can see, we’ve put some of our 12 suitcases to work for storage.
– The printer/copier comes in handy for reimbursements with our mission agency and scanning receipts for insurance, which we have done a lot of lately with Lindsey’s pregnancy check-ups.

Below: This is the only decoration we have in the room, my proudly displayed “certifica.” Never in my life have I made a dean’s list or graduated “cum laude” from anything, and alas, this graduation was no different from all the others. Though I was the top student in my class (a class of the four worst Spanish speakers in the entire school), I still only mustered a B+ in grammar. And yet despite my apparent mediocrity in beginners-level Spanish, I will always be able to point out to my detractors that I did in fact complete 60 hours of class, and did it with a perfect record of attendance!

House Tour – Bedroom

Although this has nothing to do with our ministry, we thought we would do a series of posts (sporadically) on what our home looks like, and specifically pointing how it looks different than yours. We hope you enjoy the series and get a better idea of what it is like to live in another country.

Above: Our bedroom.

Our bedroom consists of a double bed, a night stand, and a built in closet/chest of drawers (kind of like what is in some dorm rooms). Pretty simple, but pretty different.

– The bed has no box spring, just a mattress on wooden planks. Although it is hot here and there is no A/C, we have a two blankets on our bed because it gets pretty chilly at night.

– The reason it gets chilly is the window, which is always open. It has no screen, just like every other window in our house.

– Although Lucy is almost a year and a half, we still have a monitor for her (on Lindsey’s bedside table). Even though our house is small, we almost never here her because of all the street noise.

– Below are some pictures of Lucy we have above our bed. When we moved in our house had nothing on the walls, and though we’ve searched high and low, we can’t find any sort of 8×10 picture frame, so we finally broke down and stuck our pictures directly to the wall. Having pictures up has really made our bare apartment look like home.

Although our bedroom is sparse and our bed is hard, it has worked out pretty well for us. The breezes keep us cool and the blankets keep us warm at night. So although not at all like home, it has become our home.