Hurricane Season

Note from Ken: I posted this 3 Sept/07 in my last, vain attempt to construct my former blog. One point: as a Canadian in Costa Rica, I receive an email every fall cautioning me about hurricanes.

Hola amigos!

I thought I would start my blog with an offering about hurricanes

Indeed, we were spared by hurricane Dean but it looks as though Felix will dump a lot of rain on Costa Rica, which I can assure you is a very wet place between the months of April and December. Paste the following link into your browser for the latest tracking information from the National Hurricane Center.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at1+shtml/205025.shtml?5day#contents

I suspect that central México will see buckets of rain. "Rain" in Spanish is lluvia (pronounced you-vee-ah) and "bucket", or more precisely "pitcher" is cantaro. This brings me to my favorite Spanish expression llueve a cantaros, which loosely translates as "raining buckets" or "raining cats and dog". I use this expression as much as I can. "Cat" in Spanish is gato and "dog" is perro. If the dog is a bitch, then it's a perra and if it's also small, you call it perrita. It's a bad time to be a small dog in Costa Rica.

For a country that receives so much rain, you'd think that Costa Rica would be a great place to by a good umbrella, cheap! Costa Rica is a great place to buy coffee, cheap, which you'd expect because so much of it grows here. You cannot buy a good umbrella, cheap or otherwise, in Costa Rica. I bought a fair umbrella once, but someone stole it when I was at a soccer game, which lends credence to my assessment of the Costa Rican umbrella industry. This will be the plot of my novel when I finally get around to writing it.

So, if you're coming to Costa Rica between April and December, bring a good umbrella, but keep your eye on it.

Next posting: Ark construction with native hardwoods