May 19
If you’ve been paying attention to our blog of late, you know we’re just about ready to close the book on our Costa Rica assignment. Having passed the midway point of May, we now have less than one month left in San Jose (and entirely too many things we still want to do).
T-minus 35 days. We’re beginning to feel like we’re living on borrowed time. We’ve already cycled through the full gamut of feelings and emotions several times: excitement for what lies ahead, sadness for our impending farewells, relief at not having to deal with the myriad small consternations that are unique to our current living situation, apprehension at the new challenges that await just around the corner, the anticipated joy of reuniting with friends and family during our all-too-brief home leave, grief at losing the close friends we made here, whiplashing to advance nostalgia for all the wonderful experiences we enjoyed but are leaving behind. It’s exhausting, honestly.
Apr 19
Our Costa Rica countdown clock is ticking down rapidly — we’re down to just under two months. Naturally, we’re trying to pack in as much as we can even as we focus on packing up and preparing for our next transition. This means there is frequently entirely too much going on and no time at all to process any of it, much less write about it.
Semana Santa fell early this year, and while it did not coincide with spring break for DC schools, the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia opted for vacation schedules that overlapped with the Easter holidays. This enabled friends from our Kigali days to come travel with us for a week — a trip that definitively marks the beginning of the end of our Costa Rica tour.
Whenever yet another international move approaches, an urge to wax nostalgic takes over. Every get-together and outing, every beer shared with local friends serves as a poignant reminder that these simple joys will soon be in our rearview, even as new adventures and friendships in the next country we’ll call home await around the corner. We are now well inside our 100-day countdown to departure from Costa Rica — less than three months until we set foot on U.S. soil ever so briefly before packing our bags again for our onward assignment. The advance nostalgia is coming on strong and fast.
A bonus day in February only served to underscore how quickly our remaining months in Costa Rica are flying by, time slipping through our fingers like grains of sand sliding through the hourglass. We are about to start our hundred-day countdown to departure and already have spent about as much time and effort over the last month on pre-departure logistics as on our actual jobs. Hopefully, this advanced planning will help smooth the transition when the time comes to bid adieu to the life we’ve built in San Jose over the last two-plus years.
Whenever another move approaches — and our next overseas move is just around the corner — George Carlin’s brilliant A Place For My Stuff inevitably comes to mind. A house is just a place to keep your stuff, Carlin quips, and when you travel, you take smaller versions of your house with you until you pare your stuff down to the bare essentials. We move quite a lot more often than an average family, which thrusts the questions at the heart of Carlin’s humor to the forefront every year or two. Which of our things are absolutely essential and which are nice-to-haves we could do without in a pinch? Which items have sentimental value and which ones simply take up space?
Beautiful beaches in Belize. Exotic birding in far-flung locations. Caving explorations and mountain climbing misadventures. If you’ve been following our blog of late, you’ll know that January was kind to us. We still have a handful of posts in the works to catch up on all our travel tales. But while our blog enables us to daydream about our adventures and live a bit longer in our recent past, time simply won’t stand still. We’ve been back in San Jose with our noses to the grindstone for a week and a half now. Schools are mercifully back in session after the long holiday break. Meanwhile, we are entering the final stretch of what has been a dream assignment to Costa Rica.
We were “halfway to nowhere” in February. Returning to the office after hosting back-to-back parental visits and with the kids finally back in school after their interminably long holiday break, we had marked the halfway point of this assignment with a survey of the travels we had managed during our first year+ in Costa Rica. We had no idea what the future would hold for us after San Jose, but we were certain even then that this tour might well go down as our favorite Foreign Service assignment, easily rivaling — if not surpassing — our first overseas posting in Nairobi.
It’s crunch time in Costa Rica…actually, the spring months tend to be hectic no matter where we are posted. Our annual evaluations come due mid-May, a couple of weeks before the summer transfer season kicks off in earnest. Mercifully, we are not transferring posts this year, so can relax on that front. But the reprieve from packing and bureaucratic logistics wrangling comes with its own price. As colleagues go on long-term leave or training and prepare for their summer departures, both of us are dealing with staffing shortages in our respective offices. A close friend who had welcomed us on our arrival to Costa Rica a year-and-a-half ago recently completed his assignment and departed. Even though we’re staying put, reminders of the transient nature of our chosen careers and lifestyle abound.
towels packed, will travel 