its not ugly....its just flat out gaudi (kim roles her eyes...jajajajaja)

Well we have been in spain for about a week now and things have been amazing. It was kind of weird because in a lot of ways it is similar, for example people speak the same language.... alothough in spain everyone seems to understand what we say instead of getting the one person in the store who speaks english to help us. This made Madrid AMAZING. The people were so nice and the city was amazing. When we arrived in barcelona it was the same thing... until we realized that people here dont speak spanish... they speak catolinian.. which is different


anyways no time to talk.. only like 10 mins left at internet cafe... fly to paris tomorow... talk more there

10 things i love about europe

1. flushing toilet paper

i'll be honest when i first got here i didnt even need it but i flushed a peice aynyways... just out of 5 months of spite.... TAKE THAT COSTA RICA.... WOOOOOOOO

2. I aint no gringo no more

Yup...now I'm just a dumb loud american

3. olives

sure missed those. man they got good olives here

4. people understand me when i speak spanish

turns out in costa rica they just pretended they didn't. you know the whole time i knew i was fluent but people didn't treat me like i was. now people treat me like the bilingual person i am...or they just recognize what i'm pointing at...

5. priceless works of art

i asked how much they're worth and someone said they're priceless...which brings me to a new section of this blog called "GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS" (taken from a judhead jones comic book)

good news - youre tired and you find a bench to sit on at the modern art museum
bad news - the bench was the art

good news - you intelligently tell your girlfriend that you think the sculpture of the sleeping man is hideous
bad news - the sleeping man is a sleeping security guard who wakes upon hearing your insult

good news - you need to go to go to the bathroom and you find a urinal conveniently placed on the wall of the gallery
bad news....good news actually...you appopriately expressed your opinion about the piece. you too are an artist.

6. chorizo

thats some good salami

7. don quixote

he's everywhere! can't get enough of that mad monk!

8. wine is cheap...
wine is cheap...
wine is cheap...

9. the women....just KIDDING kim....i love you!...(but seriously...the women!)

10. the sun DOESN'T set at 6pm...who knew that the day didn't only last from only 6am to 6pm!

Peace,
Dave plus Kim (who typed the parts without spelling mistakes)

DAVE IS AWSOME

the only things we havent eaten are the rest of the coffee, salt and sugar... gonna be a great lunch

Well this is our last day here, and the past 24 hours have been full of last minute stuff to get ready...
actually thats a lie. for the past two weeks kim has been writing list after list of things to do, and it got to the point on thursday that we had nothing left to do before leaving. NOTHING. It was kind of strange having no tasks to complete. We felt lost and aimless. So, first we saw da vinci code, and the sad thing is i am not sure if the yelling teenagers and the crying baby in the theatre ruined anything. The next day we bought a screw to fix our laundry machine, even though we probably didnt have to, and then went to the mall. It was free comic book day, so we waited in line for an hour to get a free comic book. It sort of felt like a waste of time but i thought 'what else are we gonna do.' Kim was actually kind of upset that the line took her away from her new hobby: trying to figure out the combination of her parents luggage lock. She couldn't remember it, and she thought there were only 10,000 possibilities, so why not just go through. She figured she would hit it eventually. By early this morning she was at 9800, and was feeling pretty low. I asked her if she had checked 9999, and she said she had. So, she just kept on trucking until she got to the end with no luck. Before she started again at 0001 i asked her if she had checked 0000. she said of course (idiot) and went to check it again. it was 0000. Well, i guess the upside is that it kept her mind distracted and not talking about the last time she went to europe (by the way if you ever see her ask her if they ever took extra pastries from a hotel, and made it both their breakfast AND their lunch.... ohhh she's so bad...)

So, in leaving Costa Rica i leave you with my favourite bust of all.




I love it because it looks exactly like "the watcher" from marvel comic books. It is actually this guy who helped develop penicillin from snake venom or something, but the bust sits on a 10 foot stand and is then looking down with these empty eyes on everyone going past.... watching...
speaking of which we woke up at 430 this morning and the only thing on TV was 90210... it was the episode when brenda and donna returned home after a summer in paris... it made me thing of all of you

also brandon started dating this girl but totally dumped her cause she kept on making racist jokes. i really learned something.
love dave and his lovely girlfriend kim

I can't to get off this rock...and when I say rock I mean isthmus

Well Costa Rica is starting to get old, so on Monday we are flying to Europe, specifically Madrid. From there we are going to go around spain, then go to france and then germany.... well really i could give you an hour by hour breakdown of what we are doing (got to love traveling with a girl who likes to plan...) but i am too lazy right now. Mostly we are seeing everything and doing anything you are supposed to do. I expect to return home with great memories and even greater friends. No but like seriously for real...we both brought tim hortons travel mugs to to help make this happen.... its like putting up a real canadian flag..... lol

So right now we are trying desperatly to eat all the food we have. So far this week we have polished off a bag and a half of beans and a pretty big bag of rice. Only one bag of beans, a bag of brown sugar and about eight packets of soup left to go. Its going to be a fun night.

Anyways, Monday at 4:30 our time we head off... its a 12 hour flight. I cant wait to finally get some quality time with my girlfriend.

Be wellness today for you all now....and the future

More adaquite things about san jose

#7. The way people answer the phone.

Very few people here speak english... well at least way fewer than you would expect from a country with such a strong tourist base. But, regardless of this whenever people answer the phone they say "hello." not "buenos," or even some mispernounced form of "HOLA," but a full on english hello. This makes booking hotels kind of decieving.

#8 Jokes on the Bus

A lot of buses have those red light signs that flash different messages as you are driving on the bus. Sometimes they have news, other times a count down to the millenium (in english which i appreciate) and other times jokes. I dont understand a word of the jokes, but the part that is hillarious is that after the punch line they all say "jajajajajaja." Ok, i know that J is the H sound in spanish... but none the less its pretty funny to picture people in a group all saying jajajaja after a joke.

#9 Empanadas
Cant go wrong with an empanada.

We went white water rafting... that really sums the whole entry up... read on only to kill time

So, we went white water rafting yesterday. It was fun. We saw 3 toucans... mostly the small ones but it was cool. On the trip is was just the two of us and two guides. One guide spoke perfect english and was from costa rica. The other, Octavian who controled our boat, could only say "Forwards," "Backwards," "Right," "Left," "Lets Go!," "Get Down" and "High Five" -which he always did by putting his paddle in the air for us to hit... its really more of a high paddle, but who am i to judge. I plan to write a song in which the only lyrics will be his english vocabulary. It was kind of funny becuse he was a Quebecer....
no.... not one of those bagel baking, tortierre eatin people from canada, but there is actually a native group here called Quebecers. He was really excited when he found out we were canadian, but then not as much when we said we weren't from quebec.
it didn't matter.... he didnt speak french anyways...
.this is a waterfall we stopped and hiked to/swam in... it was beautiful... like everything else in this stupid country...

only 8 days till europe

love
Dave
Ps. this blog entry is dedicated to our moms... HAPPY MOTHERS DAY...
PPSS. the photo is dedicated to octavian who is looking way tougher than us by not wearing a life jacket or helmet and standing on the waterfall... ah zut.

Things I love about Costa Rica (cont)

#5- Addresses

When I first got here I thought getting around would be easy because every city in Costa Rica has streets all divided on the same system of Calles and Avenidas, with even numbers on one side of central and odds on the other. The only problem with this though is that there are no street signs ANYWHERE. So even with the best map, you can never find your way without landmarks. So people in CR have dispenced with the names of streets entirely, and everything here is 100m from some landmark. So directions to places are only "100m south of the Subaru dealership", or even more logically, 100m south of the old subaru dealership. Its no problem if you dont know where the old subaru dealership was, because..... what the hell do you mean you dont know where the old subaru was... it was back where subaru was before where it is now...... the old one.... yes... OBVIOUSLY its the overgrown empty concrete lot covered in spray paint......

idiot.

#5 The Pile of Trash on our street

In most of Costa Rica garbage day is the day that you set your garbage on fire. At one hotel we were staying at we saw an employee early in the morning take all the garbage from the hotel in to the middle of a field, get some gas and dry palm franz, set the whole thing on fire..... and then go back inside, cause the only thing better than a burning pile of trash, is an unattended burning pile of trash. Also those fumes can kill ya.
San Jose, however, is one of the few places in the country with regular garbage service. The garbage at our appartment is picked up like twice a week, which makes the pile on our street that much more odd. It is this 3m long pile of all sorts of different types of trash thrown across the entire sidewalk. About every two weeks somebody from the city comes and cleans it up so you can walk on the sidewalk again, but then in a matter of days it is back again. Not only does this make no sense because of the regular garbage pick up in SJ, but it is also on the side walk beside an old abandoned building with nothing in it. It's not like it's a company trying to put out their trash or something.... but just people not wanting to throw stuff in the regular pick up and decided tha this is the place it will go... nope they want to put some gas on it and burn it themselves. I guess you can get country folk in the city... but you cant get the joy of burning trash out of the folk.....

its really kind of quaint when you think about it....
before you realize that you just stepped in a chicken carcass...

We were actually lucky this week and caught a rare glimpse of the pile actually on fire (obviously unattended). Usually we just see the trash stinking and carbon encrusted... some days you thank god you had your camera.

Turtles...

So this weekend we went to Tortuguero, a national park in the north east of CR. It was crazy. Our expectations going there were kind of low, but wow... it was good. The place is pretty remote, so we had to first take a 2 hour bus ride from SJ and then another hour bus from this small town into this HUGE banana plantation (you weren't allowed to take pictures in the plantation for some reason. i think they didnt want their competitors to know that they wrap their bananas in blue plastic bags... shhhh) and then another 2 hour boat ride through these little rivers until you got to the island. It was a lot like Bastimentos, the place where we went in Panama because there we no cars and just little dirt paths connecting everything in the village. Also cause it had europeans. Bloody euros get around. So we found this nice place on the ocean and didnt do much our first night, mostly because you cant swim in the ocean because it is apparently full of sharks there.
The second day we rented a canoe for 12 bucks for the day and went paddling by ourselves all around the little rivers and canals in the park. It was crazy. We only saw two other groups of people all day. Alligators, however, we saw several groups of. Unfortunatly we only saw small ones, none of the big ones that jump into boats and eat 90 pound girlfriends. I could have been such a hero. But i guess its a good thing considering we were paddling a canoe and totally alone. We also saw monkeys, otters, tonnes of turtles and other wild stuff. It was hands down one of the coolest things we have done since we've been here.

Anyways... knowing we couldnt top that day and because, besides going on tours, there wasn't a huge amount more to do, so we headed home on Sunday. There is a whole long story talking about our bus ride home, but we have to go see scary movie iv, so i will just leave this picture now, and tell the story in person when i see you later. But oh... its a goodie...

daveandkim
ps. i think shaq is going to get an oscar for this role