January 2001

We arrived in San Jose on December 30th and had a nice, calm New Years Eve in our new apartment.  Our "Big Brother" (assigned by the language school), Arthur and MaryAlice Ivey, were very helpful and even had a nice, warm lasagna dinner prepared for us to have in our new home.  John and Laura Trautner, the missionaries that lived in our apartment before us, had left us with everything we needed to get started.

Our apartment is very comfortable and has a wonderful second floor view of the Irazu Volcano (inactive).  The sun rises over the mountains and the view out of our dining room windows is spectacular.  It makes morning devotions truly a time of praising God's glory.  We have two bedrooms, a kitchen and a combined living & dining room.  It has plenty of room for the two of us, and is far better than that of the less fortunate in the world.  We do not have a television, which is a great blessing - no distractions from our studies.

One point of interest is the shower water heater - lovingly referred to by the local gringos as a "widowmaker".  It is an electric appliance fastened to the end of the pipe above your head in the shower, with dubious wiring and not well grounded, if at all.  We are well advised not to touch it with wet, bare feet.  However, it does heat the water somewhat, and beats a cold shower.  There is no other source of hot water in the apartment, except boiling water on the stove.   This makes doing our dishes very time consuming.  You first have to remember to put a pan of water on the stove before you start eating in order to have hot water when you finish eating to do dishes.

Another missionary couple lives next door who are also students at the Institute, Jarred and Tonya Cox, who are going to Nicaragua as church planters.  School is a short 10 minute walk away, and everything we need is in easy reach by taxi or bus.  It is truly a blessing not to have to worry about a car.

Life is simpler, harder, more time consuming.  Since you have to walk everywhere, getting a loaf of bread is quicker since it's only a block away to a fresh bakery; harder since you do have to walk and if it's raining can be wet; fresher bread since it was just baked; time consuming since it is a loaf of bread you have to slice.  

We can't flush toilet paper down the toilet.  It seems the USA is the only country with plumbing adequate for flushing toilet paper.  All other countries we've been to in Central and South America the plumbing does not allow for flushing toilet paper.  

We have great Internet connections, so please e-mail us when you have a chance (edlindabaker@yahoo.com).  Technology can be interesting - we don't have hot water, you can't flush paper in the toilet, but our Internet is faster than it ever was in Atlanta!

We can receive mail at the school, but please don't send anything larger than a small shoe box, since large packages seem to attract the attention of customs.  Our mailing address is: Ed & Linda Baker, Instituto de Lengua Espanol, Apartado 100-2350, San Jose, Costa Rica.  It takes 2 to 3 weeks for mail to get here.  We would love to hear from you, via snail mail of e-mail.

Below are pictures since we've arrived in Costa Rica.  We'll have more photos and information as our weeks and months go by.  We start school on Tuesday, so things will really start moving fast.

More later in the month.

The campus of the Spanish Language Institute (Instituto de Lengua Espanol) is only a 10 minute walk from the apartment, and is very well landscaped.  There are about 150 adult students and about 75 children in their Kindergarten through 12th grade program.

Some picture of the Institute campus are shown below: