The home of Ahren Osterbrink. My photos and thoughts.
// March 31st, 2005 // 2 Comments » // Costa Rica, San Jose
and i’m off to the airport… casey, if you could have a nice cold six pack of Goose Island Hex Nut waiting for me, i would be eternally grateful….
man i’m tired (it’s 430 here)
// March 29th, 2005 // 3 Comments » // Costa Rica, San Jose
well my trip is all but over… it’s just a matter of dotting the t’s and crossing the eyes… i chose alcohol to help me cross the eye’s last night, now to figure out how to dot the t’s… suggestions?
In any case… I’m sitting in san jose wasting my last couple days… i didnt want to worry about a bus breaking down or anything like that… i have to do a bit of shopping and the likes… I leave the day after tomorrow. My feelings on it are mixed… Of course i would love to stay longer… though i’m a bit worn out. Livnig out of a backpack get’s kind of old… though so does working everyday… I’ve been wearing the same two shirts, same two shorts (no not all at the same time) for a long time… It will be nice to have more choice (though, even in the states i seemed to wear the same thing day after day)… i can’t wait to get back into some pajama’s!
I’ve also intentionally brought myself to a state of mind to want to be returning… Besides the 30 mile death march, i’ve spent the last two and a half weeks on a beach… doing nothing else but waking up at 10 or so and spending the entire day until sunset at the beach… I know it sounds nice but it does get old. Had I spent the time traveling, i would definately not want to leave… Plus, I’ve done/seen pretty much everything i wanted in costa rica, so it’s time to leave for that reason as well… I did save a couple things for the next time i return, though i doubt i’ll be back for a while…
My plans for when i return… short term… Casey, I’ve emailed you my flight info… I arrive around 1030pm or so on the 31st… meet me in the baggage claim if you can… park in short term parking. My mom will have some shoes for you if you don’t mind stopping by to pick them up… Also, i am going to try to twist her arm to send along some cheese… Thanks much for picking me up! We’re staying at Sam’s house that night and grilling some brats i assume? then heading back to wazooooo the next day…
longer term:
When i planned this trip the main goal was to figure out life. Though i would say that hasn’t exactly happened, A path has appeared to me… I will be returning to Eugne until i run out of money (great path eh?) Serious though, I am going to put another effort (and this time i feel it will work!) into being self employed in webdesign. I have enough money left from my trip to be able to live without any income for approximately two months (Ramen noodles, baked potatoes, potpies here i come (again!)). I will be spending as much time as possible (ask Jade, it’s a lot!!!) Perfecting and learning my skills… I have been given a (hopefully) great opprotunity to mentor under a programmer and learn how to program databases and custom web applications. The guy is very nice and very very good at what he does. I get to learn for free and they make it sound like they have enough work to employ me at least somewhat… This hopefully will lead to being able to travel and work (and make some damn fine money)… Ideally i will be able to travel indefinately and still earn a decent income. though that may be a bit away.
Programming is literally like learnign a new language… it’s a different way of thinking… solving a problem in a different way… it’s hard to explain, i learned a bit at college in wisco, one language i had no problems with, another i couldn’t grasp for the life of me… So it could be tough going…
So thats the path that has presented itself… Origianlly i had planned to move to Maine with Tim and Candyce, well that’s on a backburner… I have barely heard anything from them which made trying to organize the move difficult… It’s still a big possibility if Oregon doesn’t pan out… even if it does i don’t want to stay in eugene for the winter. Plus living close to Jade again will be nice.
Ideally by winter i will be self sufficient and able to live anywhere… Personally i have a weird feeling to live where there’s snow… Not sure why, i think it may be from being in summer for quite a while… and i want to ski and perhaps get into cross country skiing…
Well I lost my train of thoguht, i’ll be online a lot the next couple days (not much to do in san jose without spending a lot of money) so i’m sure i’ll post some more…
Hope you all are going well… and i’ll be keeping this site up and going even after the trip is done if you care to keep track of me!
// March 16th, 2005 // 7 Comments » // Costa Rica, San Jose
Sorry for the delay… the last thing i wanted was for my diehard fans to get roudy!… it seems some spam bot found my site as well… i thought i had it protected… but it seems not… it just posted gibberish four times on one of my posts, but it’s enough to piss me off… anyways…
the reason i haven’t posted is because we hvaen’t been doing anything… we had planned to go take a boat up the northeast (carribean) coast of costa rica to this village/town… well we were going to do it from san jose but we ended up getitng going to late, thinking there was more than one bus, there wasn’t… So instead we headed out to the carribean coast, in the south east though… spent a couple days in Puerto Viejo and four or five in cahuita… these are the cities i started my trip off in…. they are nice… a lot of good reggae…
the last four days in cahuita we did nothing more than getting going at around 11am… and then going to the beach and sitting there for around 4 or five hours… until 530 or so… then heading into town for some supper… it’s been nice… very relaxing.
Tomorrow we are leaving for Corcovado Park… i have no idea what we’re doing, and of course Paul doesn’t either… He hasn’t had an idea all trip… he just does whatever i do… it’s kind of like having a dog following me… well a dog that talks politics and about women all the time. Better than being alone? I’m just giving paul shit in case he’s reading this … I’m not really serious?
So we’re heading down there… it’s 8 hours on a bus… it better be worth it… we plan to hike around the park a lot…. camp, hopefully on the beach… then slowly work our way up the pacific coast… i hope to see good sunsets everynight until i come back to san jose…..
It’s sad… i’m starting to realize i’m doing some “lasts” down here… like yesterday, leaving the carribean ocean, it’s the last time i’ll see / swim the carribean for quite possibly a long time… I don’t plan on returning to central america for a while… unless it’s something to do with my land… i love it here, but theres so much more of a world to see… I plan to go to south east asia / thailand next… though it could easily change to South America (Carnaval anyone?!?!?) or australia / new zealand… you only get to get a 1 year work visa for australia one time in your life before you’re 30… my days are running out… One good “last” thogh, i hopefully have withdrawn money down here for the last time… I have about $230 in my pocket, i hope to make it last two weeks, though it’s going to be tight!
I sure am looking forward to grilling some brats when i reach the twin cities… and some good dark beer… Goose Island HexNut… then when i hit oregon, it’s all Black Butte Porter baby… oh mom, could you see about acquiring some maple syrup… a couple pints or a gallon…. i’ll pay for it for sure… i want to attempt brewing that beer with maple syrup again…
i don’t have much room (or money!!) for souveniers… if anyone wants anything specific let me know and i’ll do my best…
I don’t know how internet access will be for the next week or so… or if i’ll be in a city, camping on a beach, in a forrest… i have no clue… So don’t be sad if you don’t hear back from me for a bit… if it’s more than two weeks, send lawyers, guns and money!
// March 7th, 2005 // 6 Comments » // Costa Rica
ok… my mom came and went… the trip was very memorable… the last two weeks or so i have seen some of the most incredible things i´ve seen all trip, if not my whole life…. quite fun….
I obviously met back up with paul and we are heading over to the carribean coast… going to go listen to some reggae in puerto viejo again… just a day or two, then maybe head to cahuita to go hike around a park, and then take a boat up the rest of the coast to what sounds like a primitive viallage with sea turtles… who knows if they´re in season or not… i just want to get away from people though… after that, i come back to san jose for a day and then head down to corcovado… i am kind of runing out of things to do in costa rica without repeating things… which is good, i had hoped to see most of the country… going to take things real slow the next two or three weeks until my dreaded return…
I keep coming to the conclusion that returning to the states is going to be crazy… not necassarily in a good way either… i figure there will definately be culture shock… and just getting back into the whole flow is going to be really weird… i didnt think i woul dhave a problem with it when i left but thinking about it now, its going to be very strange… the pace of life is so different… we´ll see how it goes… it´s a mind trip thinking about it sometimes…
so the internet in puerto viejo is horribly slow… its the place where 8 computers share one dial up connection… so i dont think i will be using it very much… we´ll see… if it´s raining there´s not much else to do!
i´m outta here!
// March 6th, 2005 // 6 Comments » // Costa Rica
ok, no fucking around this time… i just had two guys try to rob me at gun point… i was walking home from a bar with paul, who i obviously met back up with, and these guys pulled up next to us and wanted to sell us coke… neither of us like coke… no matter that it´s cheaper than weed down here… but it turned out to them wanting to rob us… one guy claiming to have a gun, the other saying that he does have a gun and we should just stop and hand over the money…. well me and paul aren´t fresh off the boat…. so we blew it off as long as we could, neither one of us about to be intimidated… we ended up walking to a nearby busy street… which they followed us too… told us they werent fucking around… yadda yaddya…. i´m drunk and don´t want to talk about it anymore… they didnt´get shit from us… all is well… gringo´s 1, tico´s 0
// March 3rd, 2005 // 5 Comments » // Costa Rica
Sorry for the delay… i wasn´t in a posistion to get online… my fault, i didnt mean to leave you guys hanging, well i did kind of. So anyways, i heard the squatters and walked over to them and demanded rent… i then realized they didn´t speak my language, so i did my best to convey my thoughts into their crazy language but to not much avail… (is that a word even¿) it basically got ugly… they started to throw shit at me, quite literally too… they even tried to pee on me… luckily my ninja training paid off and i was able to daftly manuever around the flying feces… i´m not sure why they took such a barbarian approach to the whole thing, but i´m not really kidding that we were dodging shit and piss.
so eventually they settled down, or ran out of shit and piss and we got back to negotiations… finally i just gave up and told them they could stay…
here is a picture of one of the fuckers… there were seven of these bastards there. it was not a fair fight.
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// March 1st, 2005 // 5 Comments » // Costa Rica
Well, I guess everyone can give me a big I TOLD YOU SO!!! Today was the day i returned to see my land here in costa rica… for the last year, people have been harping on me to the fact that there are squatters down here… I said, oh no, it’s not a problem yadda yadda… well, i should have listened…and i should have listened hard and right away…
The day started by taking shitty off roads to the land… its about an hour or so from this beach, so maybe 35 mins from the closest beach… not too shabby if it wasn’t squatted… anyways, more on that in a bit… so i figured i had to pay taxes… i found the municipal building and went in… after waiting for like an hour, i was up to bat… gave them the property number my lawyer gave me, and it came up in someone else’s name… oh shit i thought, i got ripped off… turns out they gave me the wrong number… so after calling my lawyer, i found out they had already paid my taxes for me… i got a receipt too… from what i can tell, the taxes were only $1 !!! though if the receipts are in US $$$ it was $500… we’ll see… $500 is more than i thought, and $1 is way less… in any case, it’s not too much…
so from there we headed to the land… i was amazed to find it… the directions were less than perfect… anyways…. beautiful beautiful drive to it… half the time looking out over the gulf of nicoya, half the time looking out towards the ocean…. it’s up some pretty steep roads, though i think a car could do it, we have a shitty little suv type thing…
anyways, when we got out of the car, i could hear the squatters… i just kind of looked at my mom and we both laughed… we hiked into the land a ways and there they were… i tried talking to them but the language barrier was hard to deal with… shit… this internet cafe is closing down i HAVE to leave… i’ll finish the story next time i’m online… it’s a major bummer… i have some pics….. but can’t post now.
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