Monteverde Journal

A year living in Monteverde, Costa Rica for a North American Family.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

We have wheels!

Thursday, June 8th

Well, the car arrived as promised, and so far, so good. It’s got a few issues (some minor electrical problems—the turn signals are quirky), and I needed to replace the battery, but everything else is running fine. It takes some time to get used to driving a diesel, and it is built on a chassis that is essentially a small truck, so it doesn’t exactly turn on a dime, but it goes almost anyplace, regardless of road condition.

The last few days marked the first major rain storm of the rainy season. We got between 10 and 15cm over 5 days, with Tuesday night including thunder, lightning, and wind blowing everything sideways. I had water coming in under the front door of the house, so the first design flaw in the building has emerged. I spoke with Marvin (our landlord), and we agreed that a low threshold at the doorway and some caulk at the base of the one section of wood frame wall should fix the problem. He’s getting the materials to fix it as soon as he can… unfortunately, there are no thresholds available here in Monteverde, so he needs to wait until he can go down the mountain to a larger town with better building supply stores.

I’m now deep into the various projects with my students here at the institute. They’re a good group- 7 LA’s from U. Maryland, a planner from Illinois, another from Cleveland State, and 2 architects from SUNY Buffalo. We’re working on several projects for the local public high school, including preliminary designs for a new library that will also be the local public library. After that we’re looking at some road improvements (sidewalks & planting) and an accessible trail at one of the local nature reserves. Enough to keep us busy through June…

The next big news is, last night we got our internet hooked up in the house! It seems to be a local version of ADSL, and while I haven’t pinged one of the connection speed measuring sites, it seems pretty fast.

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