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To me, San Jose is one of the dirtiest and ugliest places I’ve ever been to on the planet. It is hard for me to think of life being really wonderful there, but all the small towns I’ve been to in Costa Rica were clean in comparison to similar towns in say, Mexico. My husband complains about the endless garbage in Costa Rica but I remind him that it’s cleaner than some american cities. You really need to check it out for yourself. If you judge another country by the standards you are used to in some lovely suburb of the US, you will probably be disappointed.
All facts can be manipulated. Even the ones spewed by this OECD. If our standard of living is so high why are there 40,000,000 children going hungry every day? I’d dispute some of the other facts you listed but it wouldn’t make any difference any way. I did think the fact about milk production was interesting if only because they pump those poor cows with all kinds of chemicals to make them produce more milk than any cow would normally produce. Soon there will only be a few dozen cows producing all the milk the US needs! And if we’re so smart, why is the average person so dumb, often not knowing which countries border our own?
When it comes to “facts” the Talking Heads said it best:
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
Facts don’t stain the furniture
Facts go out and slam the door
Facts are written all over your face
Facts continue to change their shapeEdited on Dec 25, 2006 14:08
Sometimes, but not always, the police department can notarize it. In my case, the report had to be sent to the main office for notarization, and then I had to take it to the Secretary of State’s office. The police letters are only valid for 90 days, so that should be your last document to get so it doesn’t expire before you get your packet of paperwork filed with immigration.
Takes about 5 minutes at the US Embassy in San Jose. They write the letter for immigration verifying that you have X amount coming in.
If Costa Rica is anything like Italy, you must have a “certified” person do the translations — it can’t be your next door neighbor or a friend who speaks the language. That’s why the Consulate is usually the one who does the translations, unless you enlist the services of someone who does this all the time. As for birth certificates, they probably are automatically certified when you request this document, but I still had to state in the letter to the Vital Statistics that I wanted it certified. I can’t remember the procedure for getting the passport pages certified — it could well have been the attorney’s notary who did it in San Jose — the one to whom I gave a poder to act on my behalf re immigration.
Office of the Great Seal is usually the Secretary of State’s office. For your birth certificate, it is “certified” and when you request your documents you must state that you want them certified. Costa Rica is not a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1964 which set the standard for the authentication of documents to be used internationally. For all documents in every other country but Costa Rica, they affix an Apostille to the certified document stating that the document was certified by an approved notary. However, having said that, I did in fact get documents such as my police report and marriage application and license Apostilled, although technically they only needed to be authenticated, which is actually the same damn thing. It’s a lot of semantics in this process. And when you send your documents to the appropriate Secretary of States office you must specify what you are using the documents for and for which country they will be submitted. it is really best to get on the website for the Secretary of State’s office in the state you will have documents issued to see what their costs are and what you must specify in your request. Buckle up. This process is not for the faint-hearted, which is why you should consider hiring someone to help you do it.
So pretty much that’s what we already told you. you will need to start gathering your documents and have them authenticated in the States before submitting them to the CR consulate who then forwards them to Migracion.
It’s really hard to get mad at the Ticos when they are so engaging and charming. The general contractor got all 24 workers together and gave them a good talking to about missing something as obvious as a water connection. Rather than watch them rip out my beautiful bathroom, I went to town for the day and when I came back at 5 o’clock, I met my contractor at the house to inspect the toilet. The plumber who made the mistake in the first place was just putting on the last piece of tile, and I said, “Oh, pobracito, he’s been working here since 7 a.m. and he’s all covered in polvo and cement.” My contractor replied dryly, in perfect Engligh (which he doesn’t really speak), “No pobracito, he just didn’t want to die today!” I laughed for 5 minutes.
I’m still doing numbers on my house but for just the house, with all the upgrades of granite, cedar cabinets and doors, custom knobs on the cabinets and rubbed bronze doorknobs, Kohler sink and faucet in the kitchen, travertine sink for the master bath, mosaic murals, bidet, fireplace etc. I’m still looking at about $39.00 a square foot, and if I add in all my travel costs for a year, the architect fees, excavation, legal fees, etc. I’m still at only $42.00 s.f. — same house here in the States would’ve cost me $450,000.
That sounds like an experience I had recently while finishing the construction of my house. My guest bathroom was all tiled, all that was left to do was put the toilet in place. The worker put it over the hole and wax seal on the floor as 6 other workers and I watched. Then I asked innocently, “Where is the water connection for the toilet?” There was none. They hadn’t put it in. So my bathroom had to be ripped apart so they could drill through the concrete to get to the sink connection. When I asked the Maestro how could a thing like this happen when they were all so attentive to details and so intelligent, he shrugged his shoulders, turned his hands toward the sky, and said, “Pura Vida.” When I had a flood of unknown origin in my beautiful kitchen with water pouring out from under my cedar cabinets, and after ripping the cabinet apart to find the leak and finding everything dry so that there was no explanation for where the water came from, I asked the Maestro how does something like this happen? Again he shrugged and offered this explanation: “Muchas brujas.” It was after all Halloween! I was told later that all my workers adore me because no matter what catastrophe happened, I could only laugh at their explanations, instead of getting upset or mad.
Is your birth certificate from California? If so, you must first get a certified copy and then send it to the Secretary of State for authentication. Go online to the Sec of State’s website and it will tell you what to do next and where to send it. See my post above for another suggestion about getting this done efficiently. It’s become a little more complicated since the new rules went into effect. I know all kinds of people who did this themselves, as Butch did, or hired a supposed “immigration” lawyer, but they still do not have their carnet in hand. I used Residency in Costa Rica and I have an appointment on January 24 to pick up my cedula, whereas my other friends still don’t even have an appointment.
You must start the process before you leave. First you should gather all your documents, have them certified and then authenticated by the Secretary of State, then they have to go to the CR Consulate in the district in which you live. Then you have to fill out the application, and all of these documents must then be translated into Spanish and stamped by the CR consulate. Unless you are really savvy about navigating through Costa Rican bureaucracy, I’d engage the help of someone who does this for a living to make you you’ve gotten everything you need. I used Javier at http://www.residencyincostarica.com. At least 7 of my friends used his services as well and we’re all very happy we did.
It SHOULD be terrifying for YOU! You have teenage children. We have managed to defeat this bogus mental screening in some states because it is simply a ploy to get more adolescents on dangerous mind-altering drugs for fictitious mental disorders for which there are no diagnostics to prove they exist — ADD and ADHD being two of them, but almost all teenagers get dx’d with anxiety or depression and some schools are allowed to mandate medication if the kids fail the screening. DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN TAKE THE TEST! There is no way to “pass” it.
Check this out: http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2005/06/17/psychiatric_drugs_teenscreen_draws_criticism_legal_challenge.htm
It says 2/3 down the page that 145,000,000 scripts for antidpressants were written in 2003. But the report I heard the other night said 150,000,000 total just in this country. There is also a stat that says (on the link to the website) that 50% of all Americans are mentally ill at some time. Come ooooooonnnn. Who can escape the net when they’ve characterized all normal human emotions as a mental illness? If you grieve the death of a loved one for more than two weeks, you are deemed mentally ill. This entire website is about the dangerous screening program that Bush has instituted called “Teen Screen” — there is no way that any teenager who takes the computerized test could escape a mental illness diagnosis. We are drugging our children in record numbers, and the end result winds up in the healdlines of the newspapers.
I’ve been following the pollution of our waterways with pharmaceuticals, and it’s frightening at best. In streams where they found traces of Prozac they also found frogs with sexual abnormalities. We’ve been protesting an adolescent residential treatment center that some church group wants to install a few miles upstream from where I live in Colorado. I protested on the grounds that all those children are drugged and there is a chance that those drugs will wind up in our water supply. I’ll check now and see if I can find the original source of those stats.
I’ll do some research on the source of the stat. I heard it on the news two nights ago when they were discussing the dangers of the wonder antipsychotic Zyprexa for which Eli Lilly has already ponied up $700,000,000 to pay claims. They also quoted a stat about 500,000,000 people taking these drugs world-wide. What the hell is going on out there?
