Casa de Miguel!!

People have been asking me what our new house looks like. It is about 100 meters from the beach.

It is also a lot different from our house in California, because there are really no exterior walls except for around the bedrooms and bathrooms. That means the kitchen, the dinning area, and the living space are all open to the air.

In some ways, it is fun to live outside. We get to see all sorts of wildlife while we are just hanging out. We have seen lots of cool birds, butterflies, iguanas, agouti, raccoons, skunks, pizotes, monkeys, bats, crabs, toads, puppies (!?!), some interesting spiders, tailless whip scorpions (Google it, seriously!) and geckos from the comfort of our home. However, these animals like to come INSIDE our house. My sister and I think it is pretty fun to see baby skunks in the living room but my mom and dad always scare them off. At night we even have to strap the fridge closed and lock up the trash to keep animals such as raccoons (mapache), and skunks (zorrillo) from getting into our food.

 

Also, when it rains really hard (which it does a lot this time of year) we have these tarp-like curtain things that we have to pull across the openings so that less rain comes inside. The kitchen is a lot like home but we lock up the cupboards to keep the animals out. We haven’t had an oven since we arrived in Costa Rica, but we finally found one that we could buy that is like a big toaster oven. My mom is SO excited even though it takes up a lot of space. She made us pizza the first night!

My sister and I are used to sharing a bedroom but here we are also sharing a bed. L There is also a desk in our room that my dad sometimes uses as his office.

Here it gets dark around 5:30 p.m. and the bugs are a problem for us if we want to do ANYTHING that involves light. Some of the moths are as big as my hand. 

We also have some seriously fat geckos that live above the light in the kitchen and eat the bugs there. And don't even get me started on the many different types of ants that we have and how hard each kind can bite. One of the really tiny ones (they are about the size of two of the tiniest dots you could make with a sharp pencil) got inside my dad’s computer screen and you could see it walking around in there.

There are a few bats that live in the roof of our house but they usually go out to hunt at night. Except the nights when there are lots of bugs to eat. Then they fly around our kitchen like this:

I love living here. It is like camping all of the time.

Pura vida!

JB