Never say goodbye.

Okay, let's be honest. I got real busy with the last week of work, then it was time for a little vacation with the missus and now I am back home. All in all, it was amazing. I hope I get a chance to do it again. In fact, I was just offered a chance to do it for the U.K. show editing in Australia in November. But I am not sure I can take it, even though it sounds endlessly better than the Costa Rica. I've been promised better food, better weather and an apartment on the beach. Hard to pass up.

But I have a job offer in the states that might be a bit hard to pass up as well. I will keep you all posted if it happens, for this blog is not over. Oh no. Even though I am not one to write that often, I intend to write a post from time to time. Because I am still an editor and no matter where I am, I want to get out of there.

Food, Folks and Fun

There are threes things that I spend most of my time doing while working in Costa Rica.  Editing, eating and sleeping.  I edit too much.  I sleep too little.  I eat just right.  

The food in Costa Rica has run the gamut from great to terrible.  Sadly the terrible food is on site, where I work.  The fruit is great (and I eat tons of it), the salads aren't bad, but the meat is always overcooked and rubbery.  It doesn't matter what kind of meat it is, fish, chicken, it all looks and tastes pretty awful.  So oddly enough I mostly eat vegetarian these days.  I supplement all those fruits and salads with a little rice and beans from time to time, but damn am I tired of rice and beans.  I am also wary of the food where I work since a family of raccoons live above the kitchen and we once saw them urinating down a wall.  Yeah.  I think I am losing weight even though I haven't exercised since I injured myself.

Thankfully I eat off site for dinner.  We are near a small town called La Virgen and we are making our way through it.  There are actually some good places in this tiny town.  We have had pizza, chinese food, burritos, tacos, chalupas.  Then there are the restaurants that serve various rices chock full of octopus or squid or shrimp or chicken.  I don't think this town sees many gringos, but they are all quite polite.  If we don't go to town we eat at our hotel.  Their food is pretty good, but again, I am tired of rice and beans and they serve plenty of it.  The best thing they make is french fries served with what they call ketchup.  It is basically thousand island without the pickles.  I once ordered a hamburger here and while it tasted fine it was no hamburger.  It was a chicken patty smothered with cheese and topped with a large piece of ham.  

About an hour from us is the biggest town around, Guapiles.  They have a casino, lots of crime, and best of all a Burger King attached to a Church's Chicken.  We have only had it once, but it was quite a nice change of pace.  I hear there is a great steakhouse in town.  We might give it a whirl one of these days. 

Some of the best food I have had was in Puerto Viejo.  Above is a photo of the jerk fish I ate.  The jerk chicken was amazing as well.  For breakfast I had this:

It's a chocolate and peanut butter sandwich, all of it homemade.  Delicious.  While there we also went to a small Argentine restaurant and literally ate all of their food.  That tends to happen with the way we roll.  

Thing is, all of us editors have gotten quite close and try to eat together.  That means that there are upward to 21 of us that descend on a restaurant.  It tends to be quite a shock to their systems.  Often we get there and someone runs to a phone and calls in reenforcments.  People tend to live close to where they work.  There have also been numerous occasions where the brits actually drank a bar dry.  Last night we did it to our hotel.  We paid the bartender a large tip, sent him home and then proceeded to drink everything that wasn't locked up.  All the beer.  All the vodka.  All the guaro (some strong stuff that you do shots of).  We kept tabs on what we drank so that they could charge us properly.  I went to bed at four.  Many did not go to sleep until noon or later.  In our wake we left tons of empty bottles and debris.  Half the brits passed out by the pool.  I think our hotel both loves and hates us.  The other guests most likely just hate us.

I had today off, and all I did was relax and finish off the night at yet another pizza place.  We are back to work tomorrow.  It has been a grind, but the end is approaching rapidly.  Two more weeks and 7 more nights of shows.  I am going to miss it, but I also can't wait to get away with my wife and travel a bit.  I have also pretty much healed.  The stitches are out, the knee wound is closing up, and the rest of my wounds are just about gone.  I might even try to go for a run soon, if I ever find the time to do so.  Until next time.

Safe Day Off

With our first week of shows in the bag, we had a huge party last night.  And seeing that I had today off, we stayed up and joined in the fun.  Sadly, I could not drink, still being on antibiotics.  But I still enjoyed the karaoke, beat boxing and rapping.  I also enjoyed the baby anteater that was found in the men's bathroom.  I don't think I have ever seen one of those.  One drunk fellow editor approached it and it hissed and tried to claw him.  Bad idea.

Today I made an attempt to go to San Jose.  That attempt failed.  About an hour into our two hour drive we can to some stopped cars.  There was a landslide during the rain and so no cars were allowed on the ONLY road to San Jose until 2AM.  I am just glad that we decided to try to get there later in the day.  It would have sucked being stuck on the other side of the landslide seeing that I have to work at 7am tomorrow.

Otherwise all is well.  I am on the mend, the show is cruising along and I think I might even get more than five hours of sleep today.  I am now going to try some food other than rice and beans. 

Dangerous Day Off

We had two days off last week before we really started to buckle down and edit the show.  Friday and Saturday.  So all the editors hired a driver and left Thursday night for Puerto Viejo, a small town on the Caribbean coast.  The Brits, who have been doing this for years, call it the "dangerous day off".  Why?  Because every year someone gets hurt.  This trip was no exception.

But first, a little about the town.  Delightful.  Great jerk chicken, great people, sloths in the trees, crabs on the beach and warm water to play in.  We watched the sun rise the first night and spent the days exploring the sleepy town filled with rastafarians, wild dogs and surfers.  One of my favorite moments in a long list of them was while exploring the beach  me, Pete Ritchie and Jon Emerson found two coconuts still in their outer shell.  We spent 45 minutes bashing them against the rocks like monkeys.  Seriously, I think we were hooting and howling.  Once we the outer shell open the lady who owned our hotel gave us a machete to crack the coconut open.  Then we feasted on the goods inside.  Delicious.

As for the accidents?  One editor cut up his feet as he drunkly ran into the ocean on the jagged corral.  Another drunkly dived into the ocean and hit his head on the floor.  And me?  Well, I rented a bike for the weekend and a few hours before we were leaving took a spill on the terrible gravel pothole filled roads around the town.  A bad spill.  I tore a giant hole in one knee, have a huge line of road rash on my right arm, tore up both my palms and lost some skin at the tip of the middle finger.  

There was a local doctor who promptly gave me six stitches in my knee.  Also helpful were Pip and Pete who came to the doctor with me.  Pip is the girlfriend of one of the editors here.  She was kind enough keep me sane while the doctor jabbed a needle six times into my knee.  All is looking good, though it is a little tough to edit.  The good thing is that I go to our medic at work and he cleans my wounds every day.  Also, the whole thing was recorded by Pete on his camera.  He even got some OTFs.  So maybe you will see a video one day.

So now I am back at the hotel, healing.  The show is going well.   We premiered last night and work has been really smooth.  It is crazy that the things I edit in the morning get on TV at night, but it is somehow working.

I am also working like crazy.  I leave here at 5AM, go to the medic at 6AM, start work at 6:30AM and work until around 6 or 6:30PM.  Then I take the 40 minute bus home.  Though the day flies by it leaves me tired and unlikely to write on the blog.  Sorry about that.

I leave you with two photos.  One of my bedroom (or at least one of the bedrooms)  and one of the view from my ample porch.  Even with my injury and the hours of work, this place is paradise.  I hope to do this again soon.  And since I can't really swim or hike the next day off, I think I might be able to find the time.

 

3PM

I know.  I know.  I owe you photos and all sorts of other things.  Thing is, we are quite busy and the internet

is only available at work.  Until now!  We just got wifi at work, so hopefully I will be able to put up a photo

or two soon.

Meanwhile, I love this job.  Is it insane every waking moment?  Sure.  I have never worked so fast in my life,

but damn is it a roller coaster ride.  We have been doing a test run of the show this week to work out whatever

bugs may arise when we start the show for real next week.  This means that we had to put together a two hour 

show, top to bottom in two days.  We had to finish by six tonight. 

I can't say it wasn't rough.  Still, my favorite moment was when I was trying to finish a package and it started

to rain.  It rains at about 3PM every day here.  But unlike most days, where we have a heavy downpour, this

rain was the craziest storm I have every been in.  13 or 14 bolts of lighting followed by immediate thunder.

Again and again and again.  Torrential downpour the likes of which I have never seen.  This knocked out the electricity.  Thankfully, we are on some sort of alternative power source.  But our ac, lights, etc. were not.  So there I was, trying to finish a package in a bay illuminated by only a monitor while sweating buckets, the audio

barely audible because of the noise of the rain pinging off the roof.  It was amazing.  I haven't stopped smiling

since.

Wishing for Wifi

Today is my first day off before the chaos begins. I coaxed Juancarlos at the front desk to let me use his Internet.

I love Juancarlos.

We got our schedules yesterday.  I work Sunday through Thursday 7AM until 5AM and then have two days off.  A bunch of us editors are thinking of traipsing around on our days off.  It should be eventful considering the British editors are a bit nuts and love to drink.  They have done this for nine seasons in Australia.  Apparently they get to stay at this posh hotel, but every season someone is banned from there and ends up at a place down the road.  They do love to drink.

In other good news, our hotel is getting wifi for the lobby. That means I can finally post some photos and videos.

To continue my streak of good luck, I have the one room that 

the wifi will reach.

I am off to go white water rafting. I am a bit tuckered since I 

spent the morning jogging through rain forests and

swimming in our pool. I think Elissa is starting to hate me : )

You’re in the Jungle Baby!

But hopefully I am not going to die.  Not that the jungle won’t attempt to kill everything that crosses its path.
 
We got to Cost Rica two days ago.  I think.  At this point I have lost all sense of time and barely know what day it is.  My flights were uneventful, though I did get to fly first class.  Everyone else on the crew was in coach.  I had agreed to fly out a day early hence they bumped me up.  I tried to avert my eyes as the rest of the crew filed past.
 
Once we got to San Jose, we all jumped into a bus and made the two and a half hour trip all the way to our hotel - The Sarapiquis.  It is beautiful, nestled next to a rain forest and right next to the Sarapiquis river.  No internet, no ac and lots of nature.  Somehow I got the best room.  It is on the second floor, has two bedrooms and has a great patio with a view of the jungle.  Plus, I have two floor fans, which is a huge.  Everyone else has one slow moving ceiling fan. 
 
We are roughly forty minutes away from base camp, which is where all the shooting and editing occurs.  It is massive.  Hundreds of people have taken over a resort and turned it into a little studio.  I would show you a picture, but one editor took some photos and they confiscated his camera and erased them all.
 
We also learned about how dangerous the jungle can be.  Killer snakes, killer frogs and fauna that will screw you up.  The first day I was here a tiny red frog crossed our path.  Adorable.  I did not touch it, which was smart.  I later learned it was poisonous.
 
The only negative of this trip is how much I miss my wife and dog.  Mostly my wife.  We have spoken everyday, utilizing my credit card.  I imagine that might be expensive.  I will try to keep you up to date as often as I can.  There is lots to tell.  And photos.  Lots and lots of photos.