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| Enjoying the sun coming up over the mountains |
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We aren't the only ones up and enjoying the early morning sun!
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Monday 7/5 – We woke up this morning once again wondering if it will happen today. The internet is scheduled to be installed, but you’ve read the stories about how THAT has been working out for us so far! Our hopes were high, but we weren’t holding our breath. We started our morning like we always do with coffee, video games (once again thanks Taylor, p.s. we’ve sent you some game gifts!), and our hike. If the internet guys show up, that will just be an added bonus for the day.
Well, wouldn’t you know it—at about 9am the internet truck pulled up onto our road. Could this really be happening? Will we get it today, or will we be disappointed once again? They pulled right up to our house, got out, and were proud to announce that they were in fact here to install our internet today! (We had talked to these guys several times while they were installing the internet at the neighbor’s houses, so they knew just how much we were waiting for it to get installed here too!)
They quickly got to work pulling the fiber optic cable from the house down to the pole, through the over 380 feet of conduit that we had laid over a week earlier.
During this same time that they were working on installing the internet, Ramie was talking with Diego, our realtor, about putting an offer in on one of the properties. Diego said that the offer could go in today if Ramie could go in to town to sign it today. Ok, no problem! Fortunately, the offer only needed one of us to sign it, so Ramie headed into town while I stayed at the house so this internet could be finished up.
The internet guys had gone down to the bottom of the hill, probably to connect the fiber optic that they pulled from the house to the pole, and I was expecting them to come up to the house while Ramie was gone. I waited and waited, did some chores around the house, they never came back up! Ramie was gone about an hour (I later found out he had stopped and talked to Loren when he saw him down at the mini golf course) and the guys never came back up to the house!! Eventually Ramie got home and I told him they hadn’t been up here at all, were they still down at the pole? Did they take a break? Did they forget to finish? And about 10 minutes later, they were back. Maybe they were scared to be working up here when only I was home, who knows?!
Anyway, away they go again, eventually I saw that he had hooked up the router and the service guy had plugged his computer in to it. We were getting so close! A little while later, he came out with the paperwork, the temporary password to the router, and told us to try to connect. SUCCESS!
After waiting a month to have unlimited internet at home instead of using our phones and trying to conserve data or going down to the mini golf, we are finally able to do all of our online chores (and online play) from the comfort of our balcony! That also means that hopefully I can start working pretty soon too!
Oh, and you know how things work down here by now, right? Well, the repair guys didn’t come to work on the well today like they were supposed to. I guess we’ll just have to really work to keep conserving water as much as possible!
Well, at least we have internet!
If you’ve learned anything from our story so far, it’s that you shouldn’t hold your breath for things to get done when you think they will. For those of you that have been on cruises or vacations to the Caribbean, I’m sure you’ve heard of island time. It’s sort of the same here except it’s called Tico Time, when they say to you mañana (tomorrow) or ahorita (in a little while), that doesn’t actually mean they will be here tomorrow or soon, but at some point in the future. Maybe tomorrow, 2 days, next week, or sometime. It’s just a different version of island time and something that you have to be aware of and get used to so you don’t get frustrated. The repair guys did come out to work on the well on Tuesday, but of course they didn’t actually fix it. They would be back tomorrow, they anticipate having it fixed and running by noon tomorrow.
Yeah, ok. We’ll see!
Wednesday 7/7 In order to do many things here in Costa Rica, you need to hire an attorney. I don’t think their attorneys are quite like we are used to in the US, here it is a very broad category that includes people that we would consider paralegals, notaries and other advisors. We have one attorney (company) that we hired to help us with the immigration process (I talked about them in a previous post), and we used the attorney hired by the company who helped us purchase our car for the title transfer on that, but now we need to hire an attorney for our anticipated real estate purchase. They don’t use title companies like we are used to in the US, here the attorneys handle what a title company normally would. Loren has an attorney here in town that he trusts with many of his attorney needs, so we decided to set up an appointment and talk to him. We met with him at his office this morning to learn more about how this whole thing works. We have been learning bits and pieces of the process from Diego the realtor and Geiner the contractor, but we haven’t really heard the whole process from start to finish. Moe the attorney was able to explain to us from start to finish how it all worked and answered all of our questions. Now, we finally felt like we understood (well, as much as you can understand a real estate transaction—I still don’t know if I fully understood all of those fees and line items on the closing statement when we sold our house in MN. I have a feeling it will be very similar here). Now, we just have to have our offer accepted on the property and we can get this all going.
After all of our questions were answered, we chatted with him for a little while about other things as well. We found out that he lived and worked in the US for many years. He lived in many of the big cities around the country and after experiencing what it was like there, he made the decision to move back to Costa Rica and work in the small, beautiful town of Uvita. I don’t blame him!!
Later on, after we were back at home, we got a message from Diego about our offer on the property (I know I haven’t mentioned which property we put the offer in on because we were going to keep it a secret until the big reveal). The seller decided that they didn’t need the money so quickly or to sell the property so badly any more like they originally thought they had to. Unfortunately for us, that means that they decided to increase the price by about double what they were originally asking. Well, now I will tell you that we had put the offer on the large property on the hill in the little town of Playa Hermosa, which was over our budget to begin with. Now it is definitely way over! I guess this one wasn’t meant to be, and we are going to have to keep looking or thinking harder about the other 2 that were also in the running.
A note about buying property here in Costa Rica. You don’t have to use a realtor to buy or sell property, however you do need to make sure you do your due diligence. This means you must make sure the person that is selling the property actually owns it (this goes for any type of property, vehicles, real estate, etc.). We’ve heard stories about people misrepresenting their ownership of property or the actual location of vacant land and when all of the money has exchanged and the legals are done, you don’t end up with what you thought you did. By then it’s too late and good luck getting your money back (99% likely not going to happen)!!
At least there was a little bit of good news after the disappointing news about the property, the water came back on at about dinner time. We could take a regular shower tonight instead of the getting wet, turn the water off, lather up, rinse off, etc. routine. Take the small victories where you can, I guess.
Pura Vida!
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