Ants, Compre Bien and a Highway Restaurant

We recently experienced an invasion in our house and surrounding outdoor areas of very tiny, reddish/brown ants. They were everywhere. As fast as I swept them up, they returned. There were piles of dead ant bodies.

Outside our back door (those brown piles are dead ant bodies):

Inside, in every room:

Yes, it is the rainy season and, yes, we live in the tropics but in our ten years of living in Costa Rica, we have never had an insect invasion like this one. We live peacefully with the odd insect who comes in our home but this was not acceptable.

It was time to call in the big bug guns. Who ya gonna call? Delgado Fumigadora, of course. Our bug technician was bilingual. The outdoor areas were sprayed as well as indoors. A return visit will be needed to spray the outside again. We, and many others, highly recommend this company. Price was very reasonable.

We had a lucky week! Both Lance and myself received our new Costa Rican Dimex (or cedula) ID cards showing that our permanent residency had been successfully renewed for another three years.

And … I won 80,000 CRC in groceries at Compre Bien, a Costa Rican owned grocery store that we frequent here in Grecia. That is equivalent to about $160 Canadian dollars.

Today (Sunday) was one of our designated driving days. These driving restrictions are in force to hopefully keep people at home in an effort to control Covid-19. We decided to go out to a restaurant for breakfast.

Searching online, I found one in San Ramon that looked promising. We never found it - it was not where Waze indicated it should be. So we gave that up and decided to head towards home and maybe find a restaurant that was open along the way. By happenstance, we passed one that looked promising (it had trucks out front, a good sign) - Comidas Tipicas El Paraiso on Autopista Bernardo Soto (highway 1) - so we stopped here.

It was a good choice. The service is cafeteria style. All the selections were identified and prices posted so you just have to point if you feel your Spanish is a bit shaky. I prefer this style of eating for breakfast and lunch as I can control the portion sizes and just get the items that I want. For me this morning it was a tamale, an egg cannelloni and a tamarind drink. The cannelloni is stuffed with meat and then wrapped in an omelette - I had never seen cannelloni prepared this way until we moved here. Lance ordered pinto (rice and beans), eggs, coffee and a sort of potato salad. Everything was excellent.

You will never guess what the final cost was for all these delicious items ….. 5,200 colones!!! That’s like $10 Canadian - for two people! This restaurant is very popular with locals.

Then, just to sweeten the pot, a special car drove up and parked. It just looked expensive … it had gull wing doors that swung open. We had to check it out when we left - it was a Tesla 10X! Except on TV, we had never seen one of those before. The starting price for this vehicle is about $91,000 in the USA, according to Car and Driver Magazine. I wonder how it came to be here and who owns it. 

I took a photo - the green-blue coloured licence plate indicates it is an electric vehicle. The people who got out of it and entered the restaurant looked just like everyone else - ordinary folk. Maybe this is a testament to this restaurant.

Click on images to enlarge.

Interesting Stuff That Happens To Us

We are quite fortunate because Costa Ricas always seem to be helping us out when we get stuck. I think it is in their very nature to be kind and helpful.

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.