Don Mateo

Is 2024 going to be a long, hot, dry year? Well, if you believe in the Costa Rican tradition known as ‘’pintando los dias’’, the answer at this moment seems to be yes. If you have never heard of this, it is a piece of Costa Rican folklore that says […]

So you are on a limited budget, but love Costa Rica and want to live here permanently. Everything seems more expensive than expected. The plummeting exchange rate makes stretching your meager funds that much harder. How to get by? I have years of experience of living in Costa Rica, enjoying […]

When I was very young, January the 2nd was the saddest day of the year. The Christmas tree was stripped bare of its ornaments and colorful lights and left by the curb to be picked up and converted to mulch and compost. The party was over and everybody had to […]

My name is Mateo. Most people remember my name once we have met, but for some inexplicable reason, there are a number of Costa Ricans who upon seeing me a second time, call me ‘Tomás’. It is not as if this has happened one or two times—indeed, it occurs with […]

December in Costa Rica is not just for tamales, family get-togethers, loud fireworks displays, the annual Gordo lottery drawing, and skinny, sunburnt Santas. It is also the end of the school year. It is also graduation time. There is, it sometimes seems, a graduation ceremony for every grade level. This […]

Recently I saw a photo on a Facebook page dedicated to residents of Quepos. Below his photo was his name and QDEP (Que Decansa en Paz). I knew he had died a few years back, but I had not thought about him in years. At one time he had been […]

I was talking with a tourist from Colombia. He said that Costa Rica was beautiful and wild and contained astounding naturaleza, but that Colombia had all of this and more of it, as it is about twenty times the size in square kilometers. I said this may be true, but […]

Feliz Navidad! Is it too early to say that? Nah– It is now officially Christmas season. Unofficially, it started sometime in October. I saw Christmas decorations in stores and the occasional house festooned with lights sometime before the first of November. The park in town got its lights strung this […]

The blocking of roads as a way of protesting a grievance used to be a regular occurrence in Costa Rica. In the year 2000, highways throughout the country were blocked for three weeks in the ICE combo protests. This was an early, heavy-handed attempt to privatize the telecommunications arm of […]

I have now lived half of my life in Costa Rica, and as I have no plans to leave, my reality is that I will die here. With the recent Dia de los Muertos fresh on my mind, I have been thinking about what I want done with my body […]