COMMUNICATION

One would think with all the new inventions to make it easier to communicate we would be a closer more communicative society. I think though that it is quite the opposite and we have only superficial communication and no real communication. You know the kind where you hang out for an afternoon and bake, or just sit on the porch and shoot the bull.

We have a skype phone in our house so that we can make business calls to the U.S, and around the world. It works ok, unless you both want to talk at the same time, in which case you just have to wait for the darn thing to catch up with real time.

Then we have a cell phone to use here in Costa Rica. Right now our daughter is using it until they get their own line from Ice. We also use that number for our business number.

Of course we have our home phone. That one we rarely use, or get calls on. We are all shocked if someone calls us on it, and especially if we get a voice mail on it. It is very expensive to make international calls on it so we do not use it for that very often.

Can't forget the voip phone. That one has a U.S. number that forwards to our house so that we can get calls from the U.S. and talk to our kids still living there. Our son who is in jail is the victim of a really stupid set up they do in the jails, kind of a racket actually. There is a phone company that takes over the phone lines in the jail and you have to go through them to call out. Well Costa Rica will not accept calls from them, because they do not give Costa Rica enough money, so we have a voip phone.

Then there is the internet. There are days when we don't even have to talk here, we just instant message each other and keep up with what is going on. Pretty funny especially when we are sitting in the same room.

So do we know each other any better, or have any better communication with all of these devices? Of course not, I can't even remember all my numbers half of the time! I much prefer a nice slow afternoon of sitting and talking and watching the people walk by my house, that is the way to really communicate.

INTERNET

I have been thinking all day about the miracle of the internet. For the two years that we lived in Costa Rica we had to do all of our internet business at the internet store. It is really cheap here, but it was a real hassle.

When we bought our house the first thing we wanted to do was get hooked up to the internet. We started the process. The first thing you have to do here is get on a waiting list with ICE. After six months of waiting we were ready to go. My husband went with my son-in -law to talk to the people, after waiting in line for 2 hours of course.

They were told that because here in Costa Rica the original owner of the home also owns the phone line we could not get the internet without the original owners permission.

Enter Darwin, the original owner of our house. He was also a gringo and gave us a smokin deal on our house. He is a decent enough guy and we figured we would have no problems with him. Well he was not the problem, his wife was. For some reason unknown to us she did not want to give permission for us to get the internet.

Enter our good friend Jens. We told him the whole story and he went to ICE with my husband and went to a different office, with no waiting by the way. They met with a guy who told them pretty much the same story we had heard the first time around. This time Jens told them the truth, he did not know where the heck the owner was and he could not be reached by us.

The next week we had the internet. That is the perfect example of the way things work here in Costa Rica, kind of weird. We love having the internet in our home, and because of having the internet we can now get a voip phone, which makes it possible for us to keep in contact with our kids everywhere.

Just one of the many things we have come to appreciate on our adventure here in Costa Rica!