Directly after I wrote about the Darkest Days of the Year, my experience of this year's winter in the Southern Hemisphere, I spent two weeks working from bed with a winter flu. Then, as soon as I recovered, I flew to the Northern Hemisphere for a week of summertime. I didn't know I was going [...]
Chris Guillebeau is a champion of adventure, and his latest book is an analysis of the mechanics of modern quests. He profiles dozens of adventurous people in his latest book The Happiness of Pursuit, to contrast the different quests they have pursued. Through his chapter-by-chapter formula, he distills the essence of adventure down into something [...]
I have been back in America for only a week, and I must confess: I love it. Everywhere I go, everything is laid out to make it easy to do what I want to do, or to have what I want to have. After living for three years in the secluded jungles of Costa Rica, [...]
Today we received our Cedulas in the mail, the ID cards that designate us as Costa Rican permanent residents. Today the Costa Rican bureaucracy, rightly earning its legendary reputation, spent an hour and a half stonewalling me over the legibility of an unnecessary stamp on a translation of my marriage certificate. Today I spent an [...]
This Friday the 13th could only be possible because of how I do what I do, and where I do it. Telecommuting in Costa Rica. My wife asks me, at the end of the day on Thursday, “Hey, our awesome friends who are visiting Costa Rica and staying on our mountain for three weeks, they [...]
It’s a nice excuse for a day trip, and it’s exactly the sort of bureaucratic bobbing and weaving that is essential to living in a socialized country. Today, we bought bus tickets that we will never use, from Costa Rica’s border town of San Vito to Panama, for 90 days from now. These will replace [...]
The mindset of Western and European people is fundamentally influenced by our crappy weather. When I want to take my kids out of doors, we have to hunt for a large list of essential clothing: Coats Shoes Socks Baby Legs (but my 5 year old insists we call them “leggings,” and if I call [...]