I have no fear of anything you post. I do have trepidation about reading some of your incoherent thoughts. e.g. Your post hints at a wrong approach of borrowing money to pay for education and then goes on to imply that it is very very wrong. I then pointed out that the alternative was an ignorant population leading to a decline in our civilization and you chide me for what? Nonsense, incredible nonsense and rude to boot.
You give up? That makes two of us. I gave up on you a long time ago. I just find it tiresome to repeatedly respond to rude people. It truly tests my faith.
Nice of the POTUS to temporarily get TSA up and running just for me. Flying out Friday and will be back home before the deadline.
Wasn't that Nancy you should be thanking from the bottom of your heart? Yeah, we're so chummy that I just call her Nancy.
Flying out of Redmond in a bit with about 3 hr layovers in LAX and Houston. 11:30 am tomorrow I will be spreading Real Americanism throughout Costa Rica.
Good luck. I'd like to hear all about it when you get back. I love visiting foreign places but am no longer able to do so. I can't even go to my wife's native Korea without going to a whole lot of trouble and meticulous planning. I now live vicariously.
The Timbers are down there for pre-season training and a couple of matches against Costa Rican teams. You should catch a match!
At LAX now. Just before our flight here we were offered a $300 trip certificate if instead of continuing to Houston then to CR which they overbooked, we’d go from LAX to Washington (DC)? then to CR and arrive 1 hour later. We declined.
Have fun down there. I spent 10 days in Jaco and it was great. Coming back to reality was the worst time of my life, but while I was there, two thumbs up!
Tour Day 1 we went to an oxcart factory in Sarchi that runs it's 100 year old woodworking equipment with a water wheel, belts and pulleys, and then to a coffee plantation. Both were interesting and fun. If our friends who are under 40 weren't with us on the trip I'm pretty sure I'd be the youngest guy on the tour at 64. 11 men, 17 women and our friends' precocious 6 year old daughter. Taking lots of photos but many are through the windows of our Mercedes bus, which is very nice and new but the roads we were on were very windy and bumpy through the hills so I'll have to sort through them. Nearly every business and the majority of homes have cast iron or steel fences and bars on all window, even 2nd story. The nicer homes have WALLS surrounding their properties. Many of the fences have concertina wire on top. 3 locals have already warned us against going anywhere at night and said San Jose is a very dangerous city. We drove around town quite a bit to see some historical buildings and parks and locals on the street often and smiled enthusiastically as we passed despite the fact that tour buses are all over the place. Coupling that with interactions we had with locals yesterday and today I have comfortably concluded Costa Ricans are mostly very nice, friendly, outgoing people. They are also quick to find ways around their somewhat oppressive 'liberal' government. Because there is a 60% tax on the purchase of new or nearly new cars here, locals quickly embraced the economy of buying a 3 year old car, so there are hundreds of car lots selling used cars which are 3 years old. Small lots with maybe a dozen cars each line the roads of San Jose and the suburbs. Large shipments of them are imported and sold to the dealers at auction. When traffic in San Jose's downtown sector got too heavy the government assigned days that citizens could not enter downtown, using license plates. Last number on your plate is 1 or 2, you can't go downtown on Monday and so on. So everyone bought another car to have another plate number so they could always go when they want. So now the traffic is twice as bad as it was before big government tried to impede their lives. In Central America only Guatemala at 16 million people has more cars than Costa Rica at 5 million people. The roads in this area are in better shape than Portland's roads but the whole country, even the resorts are unable to flush their TP and have to wipe then put it in a trash can as their infrastructure for sewage is virtually non-existent. Many homes don't even have septic systems and some have no toilets at all. About 20% of the households are connected to a "sewer system", but 85% of that sewage is simply piped straight into the rivers and ocean, while only about 3/4ths of the population has access to safe drinking water causing continual epidemic disease in most rural areas and especially to the indigenous tribes. San Jose has about 1,500,00 people, Ferrari and Mazerati dealerships, and is still attempting to build their first sewage treatment plant with assistance from Japan. Haven't seen any wildlife around San Jose, just a few birds. In Sarchi there was a half-acre lot of dead grass with close to thirty very scrawny horses looking forlorn. Here in Beautiful Central Oregon the horses would be rescued and the owner/abuser jailed. Lots of old interesting architecture, and lots of sheet metal homes connected to each other. Due to trade arrangements over their history, there is a lot of metal in the country, and it seems to get used in a wide variety of ways in building everything. Some of the bars and fences are quite ornate and beautiful., while the sheet metal houses are mostly rusty looking dumps on the outside. I have not been in any of them so I have no idea what they are like inside. There are some new buildings and lots of condos going up. China gifted Costa Rica with a $1,000,000,000 stadium. More on that later. Tomorrow we leave the Barcello resort and travel to Magic Mountain resort in La Fortuna for 2 days, with a stop at a wildlife rehab center.
It's not big government that's the problem, it's home schooling and a low education. We have a similar problem in the United States, it's the lower education people who have picked our government and are running it into the ground.
