Home at last.....
Having lived in and out of suitcases for the last seven weeks I have been looking forward to settling down for a little while. The desperate feelings of expensed vagrancy have grown, I am now actually homeless, a man of no fixed abode, which is not actually the same as not having a roof over my head, but is discomfiting. By late last week I resolved to find a new home. Marie has been a great help, searching out places as have a couple of others. Yesterday I had resolved to rent a modern three bedroom apartment near the office, it doesn't feel hugely latin American but it has the advantage of being walking distance to work. Not necessarily walking distance from work, as the gun toting robbers are normally working the five to midnight shift in the more affluent areas. I'm going to try and move in before leaving for Canada on Wednesday where Mary Kiss has found me an apartment in Toronto should it be authorised by the boss. So I will have gone from a man without a home to a man with two in the space of a week.

From the time I arrived in Costa Rica until about Friday last week, I had been amazed at just how awful the coffee in Costa Rica was, bitter and largely flavour free. Which is surprising given the awesome reputation. I had of course been buying my coffees from the ubiquitous mall coffee bars that use Britt Expresso. I bought a 10 dollar coffee machine from the cheap stuff shop in the mall that specialises in all the highest quality merchandise available from Asian sweatshop distributors. Leaving it a little late I then went out for the coffee. The pulperia (general store) had closed. I went to my regular coffee bar in the mall, where my temporary apartment is also located and asked for some coffee. The owner happily ground a cup of beans for me and I left with blissful thoughts of caffeinated beverages to come. I made a coffee. Awful! I thought it may have been the flavour of the new machine, but no a second brew revealed the coffee to have all the subtlety and delicacy of flavour that one normally associates with old engine oil. Time for an upgrade. The next day I bought a random bag of ground coffee from the general store for the princely sum of 950 Colones which is about 2 US Dollars. Absolutely magnificent, subsequent random purchase of other coffees have revealed to me that it is almost impossible to get coffee that is anything less than sublime unless you go to a coffee bar. I am now convinced that Expresso is actually Latin American for "That shit we sweep up off the factory floor and sell to Gringos in shopping malls".


My coffee machine overfills the permanent plastic filter and disgorges half the reservoir contents over the floor of the apartment unless I watch it. This doesn't seem to have upset the maid, who takes care of everything washing included. Earlier in the week she placed a laundered pair of Marie's panties on my beside table with a condom on them. I checked and as I suspected, this was maid humour rather than matronly rebuke. Speaking of Marie's panties, they encase what is one of the most perfect bottoms in Christendom. She can't keep her arse off my hands though, which can be a little embarrassing in the supermarket. I tell her to stop it, but she is forever catching one of my paws down the back of her jeans. It must be the latin blood! She is very pretty and looked great in her birthday present, perfume. However, a relationship cannot be purely physical, based on animal lust and base thoughts of unnatural acts no matter how much she'd like it that way. We'll see how things go, there are cultural differences but we have a lot in common.

As is the case whenever I'm here in Costa Rica, the blog postings are further apart as they make way for my life. Of course this can't go on. I'm back in Toronto from Wednesday for 10 days or so.