Sourdough Bread, El Residente and Heavy Rain Storms, Costa Rica

Recently I had the urge to make sourdough bread. I used the recipe provided by Gemma at her website Bigger Bolder Baking. The recipe is for sourdough beginner bakers and wasn’t too complicated. Watching the sourdough starter bubble and grow is fun. Here is what mine looked like at day 3:

Today I baked a loaf and here it is:

We haven’t tried it yet but will have some slices with dinner tonight. I found out that when you feed the starter every day and have to discard half of the starter, the discard can still be used for baking. King Arthur Flour has some good ideas - I made their cracker recipe and the results were excellent.

Here is the latest edition of El Residente magazine, published by the Association of Residents of Costa Rica (ARCR). As usual, it is full of interesting articles and useful information.

Lance had a dentist appointment yesterday at 4:00 pm in Grecia. By the time we arrived in town, the rain was coming down in torrents. We found a parking spot very close to our dentist’s office which just happened to be situated under a pipe spewing out rain water. The rear end of our vehicle is super clean! The building in the background is the Grecia municipal building.

Headed home after Lance’s appointment. As we arrived at the gates to our complex, we noticed the resident rooster has an interés amoroso (love interest). He was flapping his wings as if to say, “look, look!”. Beside him was a sweet little hen. I’ll try to get a photo of them together.

It was starting to get dark when we arrived home. We sat outside to enjoy the rain and the storm and eat some Pop’s ice cream. Here is a video I made of the storm. Our Cat likes to lie on the roof of our vehicle when it is raining.

Impromptu Road Trip and ARCR El Residente - Costa Rica

Recently, we took a little impromptu road trip around the area where we live. There are so many winding and hilly roads leading who knows where that it’s always fun to explore them. You never know where you will end up and what you will see. If we get lost, we just punch our home address into Waze. Waze is the best navigation system around as routes are constantly updated by actual drivers and it lets you know of congestion, police road stops, accidents, etc.

So we started out from our house at Hacienda El Paseo, headed to ruta 1, then to ruta 715 and drove as far as we were comfortable with and then turned around and went back on ruta 715 and onto ruta 710. This led us back to ruta 1 until a turnoff which took us back to our house (follow the red arrows).

The following enlarged portion of our route shows where we turned around on 715 near the Rio Grande River because the road suddenly became unpaved and very rough - it was already quite narrow. We speculated that it probably led to a deep river canyon and a Bailey bridge which we were not inclined to check out. Lance did an excellent job of turning our vehicle around in a very tight space.


The scenery all around us was, as usual, beautiful. This is the way to see the real Costa Rica. We drove through lots of small communities, waving to people and they would wave back.

Horses in a field:

I’m not sure what was growing here and the purpose of the white markers - perhaps vegetables.

Hectares and hectares of coffee plants - all neatly planted in rows.

Young coffee plants:

We have been members of ARCR - Association of Residents of Costa Rica - since 2010. Their lawyer, Romulo Pacheco, and his staff have done all our legal residency work for us from the beginning. They produce an excellent magazine - El Residente - that can be read on line. The magazine provides so much useful information as well as interesting and well written stories.

Here’s the front cover of the latest issue - the photos are amazing:

And here’s the link to this latest issue - July/August 2020.

We Now Have Permanent Residency in Costa Rica

Just over a year ago, we finally applied for permanent residency status. We could have done it after living here for three years with legal residency - either pensionado, rentista or investor. We had pensionado status. We were just lazy in getting it started.

As is our custom, we always use a lawyer for anything relating to our residency and we have always used Romulo Pacheco at the Association of Residents of Costa Rica (ARCR). It was very easy - we initially met with Romulo, signed some documents, paid all the necessary fees then went home and let his staff deal with everything. Just over a year later, we were contacted by ARCR -  both of us had been approved. An appointment was set up to meet with one of the legal staff and he took us to the main post office in San José. This is where the last of the processing was completed. A small fee paid for the actual cedulas (ID cards), stamping of documents, photos taken and so on and we were done!

On April 27 of this year, we picked up our new cards.

Why have permanent residency? Here are some reasons:

•  you only have to be in Costa Rica one day a year to maintain this residency
•  you can now work in Costa Rica
•  you can own a company and receive income from it 
•  renewing your status is easy compared to renewing temporary status (not as much paperwork involved and not as expensive)

But I think the best reason is that it demonstrates a commitment to this country that so graciously permits us to live here.

Milestone - We Have Our Cédulas!

Friday was an important day - the day we received our cédulas, or cédula de identidad.

The cédula itself is a credit card sized ID card with our photos, a personal identification number, personal information and our signatures. The reverse includes additional information.

Every citizen and every legal resident of Costa Rica is issued a cédula - it is the legal identification instrument here. There are different ways for foreigners to become legal residents of Costa Rica, the most common being pensionado, rentista, and investor. I won't go into all the details here - one good source of residency information is ARCR (Association of Residents of Costa Rica).

One thing I want to stress in this post is the importance of getting yourself a good lawyer in Costa Rica to handle your residency application. I have mentioned our lawyer, Romulo Pacheco in San José, in previous posts and highly recommend him. We received our cédulas in just a little over a year. We know people who have spent three years or more and who are still slogging through the process. There were no snags. For example, when we had to make visits to government offices, Mr. Pacheco provided us with an English speaking attendant who smoothed the way every time.

We're In!!

Just received confirmation from our lawyer in San Jose that we have our receipt of presentation and we don't have to exit the country at the end of August. So now we just wait for the next step - our cedulas or ID cards.


And, we need to get our Costa Rica driver's licenses this month. Our lawyer in San Jose will arrange this for us.

A Great Day Becomes a Perfect Day

Why? Because of a terrific lady named Becky. I met her on the Association of Costa Rica Residents forums. ARCR is an organization of ex-pats living in Costa Rica and we joined a year ago. It's a terrific source of information on living in Costa Rica.

Becky recommended Veterinarios Asociados in Santa Ana as a good place for Genny to stay until we found a home to rent. She has boarded both her dog and cat there and would do it again. Their website showed very attractive condos for each cat. So I communicated with Veterinarios Asociados and World Pet Travel arranged to have Genny delivered there when she arrived on June 1st.

I phoned them today to see how she was coping and was told the vet wanted to talk to me, but was not in. So I got worried that something was wrong. Becky lives in Santa Ana and offered to go see Genny for me and send me a report.

As Becky said, Genny seemed muy tranquilo, was affectionate, and played with the toys Becky took to her. They were going to let her out of her condo for a while to get some exercise. She is eating well too. It seems there is now no rush for us to go see her, as Becky has offered to drop in again in a few more days. And this is a big help to us, as we are going to see our lawyer tomorrow to start the pensionado process and not sure how much of the day we will need and if we will have to stay on in San Jose for a few more days.

We can't thank you enough, Becky - you are a wonderful person and you can't imagine how relieved we were. Here are some photos Becky took of Genny today:

Oh, and Genny has a message for Tuffy: "Ha ha, I am in Costa Rica and you are not!"

August 7, 2010

Still waiting for that last piece of paperwork ..... hurry up, c'mon, get here ...

For those of you contemplating a move to Costa Rica, I strongly urge you to join the Association of Residents of Costa Rica (ARCR) http://www.arcr.net. They also have a forum site http://forums.arcr.net that is free to join. Membership in ARCR is a mere U.S. $100 per year for a couple. They are a non-profit association serving foreign residents in Costa Rica and people abroad who want to become residents of CR. They can help with legal, moving, language and cultural issues. As an ARCR member, you can take advantage of a large range of bilingual services and benefits.

I have lots of useful links and will post them as this blog moves along.