Recently I received a parking ticket. Parking in our town of Grecia is a system called elPark. You pull into a numbered parking spot, pull up the elPark app on your phone, enter the stall number, the minutes/hours you want to park for, and pay for the time on the phone (using a preauthorized credit card number). Then I get an email from elPark with my parking details.
The ticket was incorrect and I had the emails to prove it so off we went to City Hall. The guard at the front gave me a ticket to see an agent and I guess it was a ticket for old people because I went right to the front of the line in a crowded room of folks waiting to see an agent. The agent looked through my paperwork then directed us out of the room and down somewhere else. We couldn’t find “somewhere else” in the building. In consultation with the building guards, a Costa Rican came to our rescue!
This shaven haired, very muscular and tall man indicated we should follow him. We walked and walked - I whispered to Lance that we were following a complete stranger to who knows where. Into the Mercado Municipal de Grecia we went (a huge indoor market in the middle of town). Past all the fruit, vegetable and meat venders to a set of stairs. Up we went - turns out it was the office of elPark so our stranger knew exactly where to take us. We thanked him and my ticket got sorted out.
Another example: we recently renewed our cedulas (residency ID cards, everybody has one) and had to wait for them to arrive - they expired on March 29. Since our association with the CCSS (socialized medical system here - if you have residency you must join) expired on the same date, we had to reassociate with the CCSS. This meant taking our new cedulas and all associated paperwork to the affiliation wicket in the CCSS medical clinic building in Grecia. You sit (or stand if there are no chairs) at the end of the line and wait. On this day, we waited three hours but I’ve heard of longer and shorter wait times. Finally our turn came but it quickly became apparent that we were totally at sea what with the ambient noise around us and the rapid fire Spanish from the clerk.
To our rescue! Costa Ricans! One lady in the lineup saw our predicament and sent her husband over to help us. He was bilingual so thanks to him we got through it all. It’s nerve wracking because you never know if you have all the correct paperwork and if you don’t, away you go to get it and come back and line up again. We were asked if we were married and thankfully I had our Costa Rican marriage license with us. There’s a reason why we remarried in Costa Rica. I won’t go into it here but I did a blog post on it a few years ago.
Turns out our rescuers are also our neighbours - they live not far from us in the same complex. They rescued us a second time, the very next day. Now that we were reassociated with the CCSS, we went to our newly assigned Puente de Piedra Ebais so I could make a doctor appointment. We had been told to be there at 0800 but the receptionist was telling everyone to come back at 0900 the same day. Our angels somehow talked the receptionist into giving me an appointment for the next day right then and there.
The next day, back at our Ebais clinic and waiting to be called by the nurse and then the doctor. The Costa Rican lady next to me started to chat, in English! She showed me photos of her husband and children. We traded names and phone numbers and it turns out she lives not far from us. She even went into the nurse’s office when my name was called, saying “venga, venga” to me (“come on, come on”) like they do when calling little kids. She stayed and translated for me which was a blessing because there were lots of questions about my medical history. We had some good laughs when none of us could make ourselves understood - pointing at private parts and so on. You will always see a nurse first before the doctor - they take your height, weight and blood pressure. Everything is entered into the computer system and the doctor pulls the same info up on his computer.
Fortunately, the doctor was bilingual.
The Puente de Piedra Ebais clinic is much larger and more modern then the Barrio Jesus clinic we were assigned to when we lived in Atenas. The nurse and doctor offices are large and the nurse has an electronic blood pressure machine and electronic scales, not what they have in B. Jesus. It’s also very close to our house - a five minute drive. Grecia has its own hospital - Hospital San Francisco de Asis.
