We've been here one full month!

Welcome back to our blog! We will explain these photos, and tell you about our first month! This photo was taken on a hike. We were driving to a place with this unbelievably almost undrivable road, when we turned the corner and there were these cows in the road and they wouldn't move. Joe, our brave cow swisher, got out and moved them!!!

This is a photo from La Playa en Esterillos Este. If you look carefully, you can see Alexander, Joe and Natasha jumping in the waves. The waves were crazy and so much fun!
This was taken on our hike, see first pic. It is so green, and beautiful here!
Lori, in a hammock, at the beach. Yeah!
Please turn your head sideways, cause I have no clue how to turn this pic, but this is Natasha at La Paz Waterfalls.

Joe: Our month here has been an incredible adventure exploring ourselves and exploring Costa Rica. I feel like we have all grown a lot closer to each other, and have stretched ourselves in so many ways. For me it has been a great feeling to set up an office and work in a foreign country in a way that is transparent to my clients. It has been great to continue my Zen practice with a local temple 20 minutes from our house in the cloud forest outside of San Jose as well as to keep working with my teacher in Denver via Skype, the phone and email. It has been great to let go of contact sports for now and let my body heal. Now that we have joined a health club we have been participating in a spinning class and a Tae Bo class. I am so happy to be learning and practicing Spanish. I have a teacher who gives me lots of homework! It has been great to jetison all of the certainties of the wonderful life I led at home in Colorado and find myself having to figure out everything again in a different culture and language and climate. I have just loved the tremendous amount of time that Lori and I have had together since landing a month ago. I cannot remember the last time we were able to spend this much time together. It has been an unexpected gift for both of us. Both Alexander and Natasha have actually thanked us for bringing them down here which is another surprise gift that has been very gratifying. I am so proud of our family and so excited about the adventure that our life has become.

Natasha: I really like being here. I like how we don't know what's going to happen. It feels good to have adventure in my life instead of the same old thing everyday. I still miss home, but it feels good to have something different. Mom and dad were right, we needed a change and I didn't believe them. It's not like we are staying here forever, so I know that I'm going home eventually and everything will be recognizable and familiar again. I skype with Gill and Luke and Joe and lots of friends a lot, so it makes me feel good that they are ok and that they are still there. I thought that moving here was the worst thing that was going to happen to me ever, but it's actually one of the best things. Making friends here is really hard, I never knew that it was going to be so hard. I always thought that being a new kid at NES was easy, cause they were always swarmed, but now, it's all different. Now I know how everyone who has come to our school has felt. It's just not as easy as I thought it was going to be. PEACE!!!

Alexander: at first it was really hard to be here because i didnt have any friends and i was in an unknown place. the scariest day was the first day of school. i was really afraid that i wasnt gonna have any friends. after the first 5 minutes i made some friends and i felt comfortable. since then i have been having a better and better time and now i am loving it here. we have a membership at a really awesome country club we have a weight room in our house and i have made really awesome friends. also i am hanging out with them on most weekends(the other weekends we go on family trips!!!!). its really awesome temp here too so i like it a lot. this weekend i am going to a party at a huge wearhouse with my friends im soo excited!! well after all thew excitment and nervousnes i have felt over moving to costa rica i am finally feeling really happy and grateful that we moved here. thanks mom and dad! Byeee


Lori: to be continued.....

more photos 21/09

This is MaJo (Maria Jose), who is Haidi and Victor's lovely daughter.



This is Andrea, a little cutie that Lori is getting to tutor in English! We think she looks like Naomi

Friends by Natasha & Lori

More of our school

Jose Ricardo and I (he reminds me of Nicholas).




Julia and I.


























Our bus driver's wife. His name is Emiliano, but we call him Beepmelio. See the post about driving.


Maria Daniela and I.















Miss Sandi, my teacher, and I

Alex and Alfred my brothers best friends.

Our School by Natasha

This is our school! it is very beautiful and it is outside (as shown) there are no real hallways just covered sidewalks from classroom to classroom. When you are walking to lunch and it is raining it is basically impossible not to get wet. My brother and I like getting wet on the way to lunch, although it is almost always raining after lunch. OK enough about the rain. my teacher is awesome and she looks a lot like Jenifer Bayer (don't worry if you don't know Jenifer Bayer) you will see her in a picture if you keep reading. She is really nice almost caught up with my favorite teachers from Ned! Costa Rica is being good to me and i am starting to like it. At school we have to always write in cursive (ugh) and memorize a poem every week and recite it in front of the class. The math here is really easy but everything else is at my level. This year in school we are studying Africa and it is very interesting. Our school is very beautiful and I like it a lot.

Joe, so far, Aug 21, 2009

Aside from almost being eaten by that tucan, (see first blog), Joe is doing great. It took him about 1 day to totally set up his office and get to work. He is the part of the family that keeps everyone grounded, as usual. He has taken on this adventure and run with it.

Joe is an amazing linguist, for those who don't know, he has studied Latin, a little bit of French,Thai, Mandarin and German, and is fluent in Russian. So he comes to this adventure with some advantages. He goes for it, and doesn't care if he makes mistakes, and enjoys every minute of it. For the first week, I didn't hear him use a verb, but he still got his point across and I admire him so much. His Spanish has taken off in the second and third weeks here, and it is amazing to watch! Today we went to a spinning class (bikes) at this cool club that we joined.
Rapido, mas rapido, arriba, mas rapido, respira, etc. All in Spanish. And we both loved it.

Aug 21, 2009

Just as we began to understand where we were, and how to drive to the gas station, school started, opening another whole can of worms. They wanted us to bring the kids the first day, which of course was comical because of the map issue. Anyway, we were all nervous, as neither kid had ever been a new kid, and there were so many unknowns.

One of the things that I like here is that everyone wears a uniform, so everyone is starting at the same place, no matter what their economic situation is. The thing that the kids like is that their uniforms are these comfy polo shirts, and jeans. The other thing I like, is that Natasha has knocked off about 45 minutes of prep time prior to leaving for school.

I was a nervous wreck that day, I cleaned most of the day ( this is still Lori writing). The results were mixed. Alexander joined a class of kids of whom many had recently joined the school. He met kids and liked them right away. He likes his classes for the most part and is happy going to school. Natasha definitely has had a harder go of it. She is the only new kid in her class and it seems that the kids have been together a while. That said, she went for it, and at this point, is loving her teacher, and likes the kids. She comes home smiling, which warms our hearts

Sorry, I can't figure out how to move the photos yet, so I'll describe these, post it all , and try a new post. This is Joe and a friend at La Paz Waterfalls, also a waterfall from La Paz.


Welcome to the Kinczel's Costa Rican Adventure. It is so amazing to be here and a lot of folks asked us to make a blog, so I am learning. I hope that all four of us will write as we are here, so you will be able to hear all of our thoughts and voices.

From the beginning. We have this amazing life in Colorado. Our lives there are filled with joy, amazing friends, wonderful playgrounds of woods and trails year round and loads of love. That said, this is all our kids have ever known. We decided to shake it up for a year and go on a huge adventure. Costa Rica was our choice, because we had only heard great things about it, and it is a first world country, so they have great computer and phone access for Joe.( Someone has to keep working!!) We spent the year getting ready, physically as well as emotionally. I got a leave from school with the stipulation that I wouldn't work here ( not like they are paying me).

We visited Costa Rica in July 2008, and found a wonderful school. It is called The European School, or La Escuela Europea. (http://www.europeanschool.com). Then Joe came here in June and found us a house and a car.
After a wonderful going away party, we left on July 27th at midnight. This is our blog!

We arrived at 5:30am, and got a ride to our new home, pictured above. We are living in San Rafael de Heredia, about 11km from San Jose. The home is owned by a great family who have helped us so much. Victor is a triathlete, and is super sweet. He only speaks Spanish so we immediately began to try to speak it. Haidi, his wonderful wife, speaks English very well, so she helps a lot! They have two kids, Maria Jose, (Majo) and Alejandro. Majo is 19, goes to school in France and is totally trilingual. Ale is almost 8 and speaks a bit of English. Anyway, Victor and Haidi met us at the house, and began explaining everything to us.

The first few days, maybe even the first week was filled with all of us living outside of our comfort zones, really outside.Really, everything was different. Luckily for us, Haide and family took us to the store and we got everything we needed. Then we were on our own. We had no idea where we were, and there are no maps here. Everyone is happy to give us directions, like turn at the big tree, the pink garbage can and the spray painted wall and you'll be a the gas station, but I am realizing how map dependent we are as a culture. So little by little, the world of San Rafael de Heredia began to open itself to us.

I gotta tell you about driving here. It is crazy driving at it's best. There are no rules except go for it and beep. Stop signs and stop lights are optional, I think. My favorite one is a two holed hanging light on the way to Heredia, the bigger town near San Rafael. The top hole is a red arrow, pointing to the left. The bottom one is yellow. There is a stop sign and a line on the road that implies stop. Both lights are constantly blinking, and the funny part is that no one does anything at that light except zoom through it and beep. Alexander thinks this is the best place to drive in the world. Joe of course loves it too. It took me a bit, and I have to say, that I love it too. We are bound to get loads of tickets upon our return to the states.
It is so interesting how everything is expanding with increased information. For example,
we decided to take a trip to the La Paz Waterfalls during the first week, which we had been to last summer. Of course we hadn't driven, and our driver knew all about the pink garbage can and the graffiti wall etc. We didn't, but we went for it. We were following signs, Joe driving, me with my dictionary, trying to figure out where we were and why the road looked like a huge mudslide waiting to happen. It took us 3 hours to get there asking everyone for directions. One guy told us to go to the bombo blanco and turn right. Alexander and I thought it had something to do with firestation, cause bomberos are firefighters. It was a white gas station, but we found it It is a beautiful place with waterfalls, and tons of cool birds, see photo of Joe, and frogs (poisen dart frogs) butterflies and snakes. As we were leaving, I bought a MAP!!!! It was so great, although it isn't exactly the map that I needed, I was so happy to have one. And we found out that the area that we were driving through, the mud slide road, was where the earthquake had happened 9 months ago. Driving back through it, we had a way different perspective, for sure.