With all the sediment coming in, and the sometimes tea-colored water, we attempted to turn the water pump on and switch to well water. That experiment didn’t last long. The well water is literally black and smells most terrible. Well, it’s worse than “mountain water”, but that’s not saying much.

Arp and I are getting really excited about the coming move to Florida. We’ve both admitted to ourselves that we don’t do well staying in one place for very long. When Arp asked me, I agreed that if I had to predict, I doubt we’ll stay in Florida for more than 2-3 years, tops. We had a good laugh when we admitted to each other and ourselves that we feel this way!  I’m just incredibly thankful that we are both like this. I can’t imagine being married to someone who didn’t feel the same way as I do on this matter. We were obviously meant to be!

[Water photo icon by darkpatator]

Yes, he's wearing Elvis shades and trying to stick as much stuff in them as possible.

I was chatting with a friend and mentioned moving back to the US and his response was ‘I’m so sorry man – too bad it didn’t work out for you.’ I was a bit surprised because I hadn’t thought about it in terms of regret at all – because we have no regrets about our experience.  Another couple of friends, one of whom I’ve known since high school, got it right – 1) we spent a year in paradise and 2) having made it here, we know we can do anything now.

Those two sentiments are right on the money.  Would I trade this past year for another year of the same old, same old in NY, with a boring-ass job, a commute and cold weather?  Hell no.  And the feeling I got after spending 4 years realizing this dream is that we really can do anything.

Plus we never imagined this as being forever.  I don’t know if I can live anywhere for a long time, without getting the itch for something else.  We’re thinking Florida now, but we will maintain our permanent residency here.  That means coming back for 4 months a year.  Having an excuse to come back to paradise is a good thing

Here are some of the positives I got out of the past year:

The lineated woodpecker - now I know where Woody got his hair.

This little guy/gal is looking for cookies to steal.

• Great weather.  We even lucked out with the rainy season not being so rainy.
• Realizing that our preference for warm weather was right on target – we’re really happy with the heat and still want to live in a hot climate.  It’s ok to admit that We Don’t Like Cold Weather and do something about it.
• Language – I’m happy with what Spanish I’ve learned and want to continue learning.
• We had an amazing birth and an utterly beautiful baby, two things we will always associate with Costa Rica.
• M & J had to be with each other a lot by necessity and their relationship has really blossomed.  Could be just them growing older, but I see a closeness that is more palpable than before.
• Nature up the wazoo – all the neat birds, lizards & creepy crawlies.  Toucans, lineated woodpeckers, pelicans, herons, tanagers of various colors, parrots and other colorful tropical birds vs cardinals, robins & sparrows?  That’s is pretty one-sided
• Monkeys.  If there’s one animal that we truly loved, it was the monkey.  They’re adorable yet give a glimpse into ourselves.  I definitely need to see more monkeys before we leave.
• Amazing plants & witnessing the constant growth.  Fragrant breezes smelling of citrus, flowers or the sea air.
• The Caribbean beaches.  Usually so sparsely populated that we felt like they were just ours.  The water was a bit warm, but always easy to get into.  And you could always count on seeing some sort of wildlife.
• A monkey stole my cookies.  Yes, he was a little fucker but it was fun to watch him scurry away.
• Witnessing the rhythms of different seasons & weather patterns.  Seeing microclimates in action.
• Fresh, locally grown organic coffee.
• Weekly trips to the feria (farmer’s market), where we met our local coffee grower, some of our farmers and Tom & Jan, a wonderful couple from Pennsylvania who made scrumptious baked goods.
• Realizing how important having like-minded parents around us is.
• Realizing – again – that I’m married to my best friend and there’s no one else I would rather be with through thick & thin.

It’s been an amazing experience that we will return to in 2011.  It’s also been something that we’ve learned from and that has changed us.  I don’t feel anything negative about it at all, and in some ways will be very sad to leave.  Knowing that we’ll be back makes things easier.

We’ve been a  bit uncomfortable, in little or bigger ways, since we arrived in Costa Rica. And while we still love many parts of this country, we think it just might be time to move on.

For me (Arp will have to tell his own story), much of it has to do with the kids. I’ve felt for quite some time that our move has unfortunately limited their experiences. It’s been kind of the opposite from what I expected. I had great plans for them learning a lot from travel. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to think that only rich people can really give their kids that experience in this country. Our money situation, which is on the limited side of things, means that we can’t just pick up and spend the weekend driving to explore a volcano at the drop of a hat. So we tend to stay close to home.  In New York, this situation wasn’t quite so limiting since the US has the infrastructure to support libraries, free trail systems, playgrounds, parks & museums (payed for by special cards through our library). Here in Costa Rica, the books cost money and are often not available in English. Or we have to pay a lot of money to ship them from the US. Museums are almost non-existent. Trail systems are very limited here. Most of them are part of National Parks, which means entrance fees. It’s true that the fees are greatly reduced now that we are residents of Costa Rica, but still, the trails are few and far between. And my kids really miss playgrounds. I’ve seen very few playgrounds here. The ones I’ve seen are either extremely small or very outdated and dangerous. Like, maybe one of those scary metal slides that heats up in the sun and burns your butt. In summary, I feel that with our more limited money situation, maybe the US has more to offer our children right now. I hate to come to the conclusion that world travel is only for the rich, but maybe in some ways it is.

On my side of things, I’ve had a lot of trouble meeting people that I can really let down my guard with. Let’s face it – I’m pretty darn radical and I live my life very differently than most people. That can be very isolating. It’s a fact of life that I have to walk on verbal eggshells with most people I encounter. Most people I meet have very little experience with EC, tandem nursing, extended nursing, gentle parenting, non-coercive parenting, etc. Now, if you throw the entire concept of radical unschooling into the mix, I become very mind-boggling to most people. Believe me, I understand all this. So it turns out that I tend to have conversations with most people that involve constantly self-editing. I’ve tried just  being myself, but that doesn’t really work so well, and I end up endlessly explaining myself. I’m not sure what is more exhausting – walking on eggshells, or explaining how I really feel.

Back in the US, it was possible to actually find people (albeit a few) who I could be myself around. These are the people that I seem to actually approach friendship with. Here in Costa Rica, this is almost impossible to do. It comes down to the numbers. It’s generally not going to happen with native Costa Ricans due to language issues (I’m still working on my Spanish) and the fact that very few (if any?) Costa Ricans parent the way I do. Expats are generally few, and the majority of them are traditional parents also. So I end up with very few parents who I can actually talk to.  After 10 months here, I’m pretty sick of being isolated. Back in the US, we could always seek out members of our local unschooling group, but unschoolers are very very few in Costa Rica. The few families that we have really enjoyed spending time with live in places we don’t want to live.

It’s looking like our next move might be Florida. It’s warm or warmish, it has lots of beaches, and it has some areas where the cost of living is fairly cheap (cheaper than NY, at least). Our family is itching to move on. Arp and I are bored here. But we will be back again – at least to visit. Someday maybe we’ll want to stay again in Costa Rica. When we come back again, I’m sure we’ll be more able to enjoy the things we love about Costa Rica. We’re ready now for a new place and new people. And I’m ready to have libraries and a dishwasher again.

Nurdles. Such a cute word. Sounds like a pool toy or a board game, perhaps. But they are nothing like that. Nurdles are plastic resin pellets that are the base material for all the plastic things that are generally made. From water bottles to synthetic clothing to plastic shopping bags. These plastic pellets are used to make a huge number of materials that probably fill your house. Over 250 billion pounds a year are shipped around the world to make lots of plastic stuff. I found this bunch in just 30 minutes by quickly looking at the high tide line along an approximately 10 foot long section of beach. The sad part of the story is that this beach, Punta Uva, is widely called one of the most idyllic beaches along the Carribbean Coast of Costa Rica. (insert picture of punta Uva)

These nurdles were by no means obvious. Normally I consider Punta Uva pretty much garbage-free. The beach is almost always empty, just the way I like it. Most of the beaches here on the Carribbean Coast are, especially compared to some of the mobbed beaches in the NY Metro area that I’m used to. The only reason I was actually looking for nurdles was that I read this article about all the plastic floating around in the ocean, from the famous North Pacific Gyre to the various other garbage-dump like vortexes of the seas. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d actually find any nurdles here in Costa Rica. It was hard to believe that a beautiful place like Punta Uva would have such a polution problem. But I’ve learned that this isn’t a problem with just any one country or any one beach. This problem is so widespread and insidious that it literally touches us all. In just 30 minutes of looking around a tide line, I found that even in my new country, sometimes dubbed as an eco-paradise, the world’s obsession with plastic still penetrates.

We’re on the eastern (Caribbean) coast of Costa Rica this week. We’re staying in Puerto Viejo looking for a long-term rental. We want to live on the beach near beautiful palm trees and azure waters, and beaches that range from pristine white sands to the black sands of Playa Negra, which come from volcanoes. But what I discovered is that these “pristine” beaches are not so pristine. I guess I didn’t really believe they were totally pristine to begin with. I mean, I’ve been hearing that the coral reefs are becoming quite damaged due to silty runoff from development for quite some time. But those nurdles came as quite a surprise. I mean, they are hard to see. During the first 5 minutes that I looked for them, I actually didn’t notice any. In fact, I could have sworn that those nurdles were actually tiny stones. But then one of them caught my eye and I realized the shape was a little too regular to be a stone. But I didn’t have my microscope down at the beach. So I did what I thought was the next best thing – I bit the suspect object between my teeth. It was then that I became sure that it was made of plastic. It may look like a tiny stone, but it felt like plastic. Once I knew what I was looking for, the nurdles were easy to find. And they were everywhere. I couldn’t stop looking for them. Every time I found one I would cringe. A passerby listening to me would have heard a crazy-woman with her face almost touching the sand, shouting words to myself like, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe this!” I wonder now how many pieces of even smaller plastic were in my search area. I wouldn’t have been able to detect smaller pieces of plastic without a microscope, but I know they are there. After all, this kind of plastic never really disappears. I know from all my reading that it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, forming a not-so-delicious seawater soup. Soon we’ll have entire beaches partly made up of ground plastic, that is, if we don’t already have that.

Punta Uva, Costa Rica

When I came home and re-read some articles about floating plastic sea-trash, I kind of freaked. Evidently, plastic floating in the ocean is like a sponge for toxic chemicals like PCBs. I bit a few nurdles on the beach to see if they were plastic or rock. Granted, I spit them out. But PCBs? I think I might be radioactive right now. Think of that next time you get caught in a wave on your favorite beach and manage to accidentally swallow some water and a little sand. Likely, you swallowed some PCB-rich plastic too. You can’t escape it. It’s there, most likely on every beach in the world. And it’s not going away anytime soon. There seems to be no way to clean it up either. We don’t have special nurdle magnets.

Are you wondering how the nurdles got to my beach in Costa Rica? From all my reading, I’ve learned that there are several possibilities. One likely possibility is that they were washed off a ship. Millions of nurdles are shipped around the world every day, from plastic production plants to manufacturing plants. Just a pound of nurdles has about 25,000 pellets. Even when a ship loses a few handfulls here andthere, they scatter far and wide, travelling around the world. Sometimes they get caught in the North Pacific Gyre, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yes, we have a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean, twice the size of Texas, and with no way to clean it up. And if those fallen nurdles don’t get stuck in an ocean gyre, they float around on currents until they land on your favorite beach. Or maybe they get eaten by some krill before that (and then the krill gets eaten by a whale). Or maybe a seabird gobbles it up. Back to the source again, maybe the nurdles are being transported by train instead of boat. But a pound or two falls off the train onto the ground. Then it rains and washes the nurdles into a stream, and then a river, and then right back out to sea. No matter how it happens, it all comes to the same thing in the end.

I challenge all my readers who visit beaches: look for your own nurdles. Do your own experiment like I did. Take a short section of beach and see how many you can find. Look close, and don’t mistake a nurdle for a rock. Maybe if we all face the hidden existence of the nurdle, we can all do something to stop this before we have entire nurdle beaches. Before all sea creatures (and us!) are poisoned.

I think maybe the best we can do at this point is to stop using all that plastic. There’s no other way. If we want plastic, nurdles will continue to be produced at a huge rate and will find their way into the sea. I mean, we have bigger problems than just nurdles anyway. I found many larger pieces of plastic on that day at the beach. Plus, many of those lovely facial and body scrubs we use these days actually have plastic pellets in them. Can you believe that? We are actually washing our faces in plastic and then washing the tiny plastic balls right down the drain. It’s mind-boggling. It isn’t just plastic pellets either. It’s the plastic grocery bags, water bottles, sand toys, and every other plastic doo-hickey you have in your house. Our lives are filled with plastic. The nurdles are just the most hidden evidence. They are so numerous, they won’t be hidden for long.

Look for them. I dare you.

More information on ocean trash & nurdles:

What’s a nurdle?

The World’s Rubbish Dump…

Trashed

Why Plastic is the Scourge of Sea Life

Message in a Bottle

Being without a dryer shouldn’t sound so bad. After all, it’s great for the environment. When we lived in New York, I wanted to set up a clothes line for quite some time in order to both save energy and a little money.  Unfortunately, our New York house had several logistical issues that made clotheslines a very difficult proposition.

Here in Costa Rica, things are quite different from New York. I have met very few people who actually own a dryer here. Everyone has a clothesline. Actually, everyone has multiple clotheslines.  Our current rental has 3 sets of clotheslines. Sure, there are a few of the more affluent gringos that have dryers, but most get along fine without one. Even if I wanted to buy a dryer here, it would likely cost double the price than I would get it for in the United States. Electronics and appliances are very expensive here. I’m not getting a dryer anytime soon.

Overall, I feel very good about letting my clothes line-dry. I’m saving energy, harnessing the power of the sun, and saving some money while I’m at it. Those are all very good things. Plus, drying my clothes on a line really is no big deal. Most things dry pretty quickly. And with 5 people in our family, we have to keep up with the laundry anyway.

But diapers are another story. I’m using nice, plush prefolds with 8 layers of fabric. They take quite some time to dry! Drying clothes wasn’t a problem in the dry season. Up until May, I could leave clothes hanging on the uncovered clothesline overnight, with no fear of rain. And with the incredibly dry air, my clothes would dry fast anyway. But B was born at the beginning of May, just in time for the rainy season. Not only has the general humidity gone up, but we now can expect almost daily rainstorms that come by 2-3 pm on most days. This complicates diaper drying significantly. I have one uncovered clothesline area, pictured above, that catches the sun. Even if I wash the diapers at 7 am and have them out by 8 in the hot morning sun, they are usually still not completely dry by the time the rains roll in. Then I have to take them all down and move them to one of the other 2 covered clotheslines for further drying.  Then they are usually dry by the next morning, as the humidity that comes with afternoon rains further delays drying.

Many days I don’t get the diapers up until 10am or so. It’s hard to be regimented about things when you are up all night nursing a baby. So on those days, I don’t even bother with the direct sun. I just hang the dipes right under a covered area. Thankfully, they still usually dry by the next morning. But no matter how you cut it, half my diaper stash is out of commission each day. Which means that I basically have to wash a load of diapers every single day. Takes some time, I tell ya. Much different than what I did back in the states (wash and dry in a dryer in under 2 hours).

Regardless of the effort, I remind myself of these things:

• By harnessing the sun’s power, I’m helping the world a little every day.
• Diapers and clothes smell fantastic when they are sun or air-dried.
• I can’t afford a dryer anyway, so I might as well make the best of things!

(Thanks to www.Strocel.com for the idea for this post).