Aqui Estoy

So I´m here in Costa Rica. I´ve been here for a couple days and have just been studying spanish by reading spanish natinoal geographic and watching spanish-translated Anime. Needless to say it´s been relaxing. I start at the farm up in the Nicoya on Wednesday so it´s all practicing spanish till then. Here are a couple of pics to give you an idea where I am.

Here is a crazy garden spider from our yard here in Escazu. A lot of the insects here are pretty impressive looking like this one. Hopefully when i´m living out on the farm and have more research materials I can tell you more about what I see.

This is what a street in Escazu looks like. I lived here for 4 months last year practicing spanish. Escazu ias about 10 minutes from downtown San Jose.

Preparation

Preparing for Costa Rica. I've made a list of some 20 items that I have to track down and buy before departing such as a Moleskine full size journal, headlamp, compass etc. I also have to find a couple reliable books to take with me that will keep me company in this land of strangers, busses, foreign village squares, hostels of other white tourists, humid parks with concrete algae covered benches, and those in between moments when you leave the friends you've just made days ago, following your journey to another destination. It's going to be a fantastic trip.
My goals: To visit at least 4 farms and gain some loose understanding of how their systems work. To Take a ton of notes and sketches and to make them clearly and patiently enough to be able to go back and refer to them. To get some rough idea of the productivity of these farms, and to be able to take a guess at the eventual productivity of my farm. To forge good relationships with all of the farm owners and staff so that they can continue to be resources. To be action based. To be doing, all the time, without hesitation or over analyzation.

Closer

Closer and Closer to Costa Rica. I'm gonna stick around for voting day and then I'm heading out the 6th of November or so. I've got a buddy, Perch, from Santa Cruz that i've been corresponding with who is very interested in coming out to Costa Rica. He asked me the other day what my vision is for the beginning and it got me thinking about the first year. I was saying my rough plan is:
I'll have a car in January. i think the first three or four months I'll be hiking around the farm establishing property lines, digging trails and making fences, and constructing a crude outpost with perhaps a stove, chairs... I think I will build a few shelters in that time as well because once the rainy season starts we'll need them for work space and for storage.
Around April i'll have a much better understating of the topography of the farm and maybe I'll want to go checking out other farms and travelling around a bit, picking up some ideas. maybe I'll do this for a month or two, or three. now I'm not positive how well construction can be done during the rainy season But I'm thinking around summertime I'll have a better idea of the first phases I want to do and I might hire a guy or some to help me build a permanent structure to live in with cooking, sleeping, shitting and relaxing facilities. Then we begin to figure out water catchment systems, and electricity, maybe hydroelectric, maybe solar. Then the garden will be getting going nicely I think, the compost should be ready. maybe I'll build a chicken coup, maybe buy a goat and get established.. And somewhere we'll be terracing land to plant some Cacao.
Ohh and about that picture. My That Costa Rican woman to my right is Senora Montero, the Mother of my Dad's Costa Rican lawer. She's out here for the month learning english and was showing us all how to dance to reggaeton. Pretty classic stuff.

Hello

Tomorrow I move to Santa Cruz for the summer to study sustainable agriculture. I don't know where I'm going to live yet but I have a couple couches to stay on while I get everything sorted out. The class should be good. Since this is my first post I should update you on my plans:

I've been living in Ojai, Ca for 6 months working at the Boys and Girls club saving to go back to Costa Rica to start a permaculture farm/hostle. One of the things standing in my way is my complete lack of understaning of how plants work, so I found this class, Agroecology, at UC Santa Cruz to take over the summer. It's supposed to be a good hands on course where we get to do work in the field every day, but also learn scientific explinations of plants. That class goes from June 23rd to August 29th.

After the class I'll return to Ojai for a week or two to reorganize and eat some mexican food, and then it's down to Panama with my dad to get a 4-runner, then I'll be on my own in Costa Rica. I lived in Central America for 8 months last year, 6 in Costa, so I'm pretty familiar with it.

My family already has a farm down there with nothing growing on it, this is the view more or less.. This is actually our neighbors farm, ours has no grass, but you get the picture.

It's very wild, almost pure jungle, some oldgrowth, some secondary. So it should be an adventure, trying to fix the soil up and get a farm going.