Fog

The fog here really is like nothing else I've ever seen.
To call it "pea soup" is an understatement.
When the fog rolls in, you cannot see a thing, including folks standing directly in front of you. Everything simply disappears in a white cloud. And it rolls in quickly so you could be standing talking to someone one moment, and then poof! they dissappear in a cloud. Yesterday I was riding home from Santa Elena with groceries in a taxi. He was driving along just fine, and then poof! the road vanished. I don't know how he was managing to keep driving, as it appeared as if he was driving directly into nothing. The ends of the earth. He could see only about a foot in front of the car, the rest was a wall of fog so dense that everything is enveleped into it: the houses, the mountains, the trees. I asked him, laughing, "Donde es el camino?" (Where is the road?) He answered, also laughing, "No se! Donde?" (I don't know, where?) He then indicated that he was driving by looking at the mud puddles in front of him. I suppose the idea was, if the mud puddle disappears, then he must have driven off of the road.
That's one the things I love about this place. Everyone laughs about what, in another context, might be mildy unsettling or frightening. Even the most frustrating things, folks laugh about. It's great. It really rubs off on you too. The other day the electricity was out for about six hours and we all had a good laugh about that one. People also laugh a lot about the roads. I met a man walking to school yesterday who works at the other school here in Monteverde. We chatted (in Spanish!) about how I liked it here. He asked, laughing, "And what about the roads!??" I laughed and said that the roads were just fine. A few weeks ago, Melody called to tell us the water would be shut off on the farm for a while and we should fill buckets of water to use to bath, cook, etc. We laughed a lot about that one too. Particularly when we filled about ten containers with water and they were sitting all over the house. On Saturday night, we were riding on the back of Wolf's truck with about eight other people and Benito kept laughing and laughing when we would get close to trees and folks had to duck to not hit their heads. He also laughed and told us a couple of stories about times when he was a kid and his brothers would drive truck really fast and he would fall out of the back. Ha! Ha! Funny stuff.
When we told the story of being locked out of our house, we had Benito, Lucky and Wolf in histerics. They kept laughing and laughing. Ha! Ha! You were stuck in the pouring rain and the key didn't work! Ha! And we always laugh too, because that's just what you do in Costa Rica. Pura Vida!