Pura Vida

PUBLISHABLE HONEYMOON HIGHLIGHTS:
• A steady diet of pineapple and mango, until it made us ill. After which we kept eating it in small doses, just accompanying it with larger doses of Tums, tic tacs, and Sprite. (Until Jacob decided to eat an entire mango in a fit of childhood indulgence, which he regretted later.)• Jacob’s dance of startle-ment/anxiety and subsequent attempt to “run away” when he stepped on a piece of seaweed in the ocean.• Gathering shells for a full morning before lunch one day—walking among tide pools during low tide, filling our pockets with shells to be made into necklaces, picture frames and other reminders of our time there• Laying around by the pool, sipping Sprite and watching people while my skin was warmed by the Costa Rican sun.• Iguanas! At least that big one that just sort of loafed around by the snack bar, looking threatening and occasionally scuttling over to snatch up bits of pineapple.• Waking up to howler monkeys. Which was actually kind of terrifying at the same time as cool. It was cool to be in a place where you’re awoken by monkey calls. But have you ever heard a howler monkey? They sound kind of scary. And by "kind of scary" I mean "like a prehistoric monster from the depths of hell." Honestly. Did you know their call was used to create the T-Rex's roar in "Jurassic Park"? Click here to get a taste of what I woke up to. I was terrified, but felt like a pansy for waking Jacob up to comfort me, so I just laid there, being terrified.
• Feeling beautiful for a whole week, without makeup or my hair done or a flattering outfit.
• Getting into the habit of having scripture study and prayer together every morning and evening.
• Waking up next to the love of my life every morning. (Often followed by telling each other our dreams. Highlights include: 1) a Pixar-esque adventure featuring an evil Zorro-like steer who was keeping everyone’s money, and who was eventually thwarted by Jacob and a justice-loving cow. 2) Beckah and I trying to one-up each other by what absurd thing we would do with the wedding bouquet if we kept it. Beckah won it by deciding she would have it make out with the head waiter of the drive-in movie theatre. 3) I was a Victorian con-woman and I looked like Rachel McAdams/Scarlett Johanssen—aka SMOKIN’ HOT—who faked affairs with oppressive married men so that their wives would find out and get so mad that they would leave the men who were holding them back and make their own way in the world. Slightly flawed plan/operation, but it was cool in my dream. I was a liberator.)
• Practicing Spanish. Which often involved teaching Jacob (who’s vocabulary is greatly improved under my tutelage, if I may say so myself), and more often involved me feeling like I just barely had any idea what was going on.
• 70’s/80’s Night @ the Amphitheatre. We didn’t actually attend, but our room was close enough to the amphitheatre to hear it. It didn’t seem to hold terribly strictly to the 70’s/80’s theme, but it was still fun. We were serenaded to sleep that night with such hits as “La Bamba,” “Cuban Pete” (from “The Mask”), “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Like a Virgin,” Abba’s “Rasputin,” Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” and two medleys, one of Michael Jackson music, and one of songs from “Grease.”
• Our TAM tours representative. Or more specifically, her name. Jusy Wauters. Pronounced “Juicy Waters.” I always used her full name when we were talking about her, because I got such a kick out of it. On the last night we were in Costa Rica, Jacob dreamt that Jusy Wauters found out that we were laughing about her name, and murdered us in our beds with a kitchen knife.
• Our adventure of taking a taxi and going into town to find a pharmacy early one morning. We learned the Spanish word for “laxative.” Our souls agreed with Costa Rica, but our digestive systems put up a bit of a fight. The accompanying details of this several-day episode will be left up to your imagination, since I labeled this list “PUBLISHABLE.”
• Hilarity in the Houston airport upon return from Costa Rica on Saturday night. Jacob was sick, I was sick, he had barely slept, I hadn’t eaten in 13 hours, our flight was delayed and sent to San Antonio, then sent back to Houston. We’ve learned that the combination of lack of sleep/food/health with the addition of late night airport navigation makes both of us slightly drunk. I had no filter, we both found everything the other one did ADORABLE, and we laughed at EVERYTHING. And then we tried to get a hotel and a ride there and the hilarity transformed into gritted teeth and whispered obscenities in frustration.
• Photo Scavenger Hunt in the Houston airport on Sunday. Our connecting flight to Salt Lake for Saturday night was delayed until Sunday night @ 9:20 pm. We had to check out from our hotel at noon, so we had about 8 hours to just live in the Houston airport. So we came up with additional ways to entertain ourselves, aside from the average internet/reading/sleeping/eating. We collaborated on a list, armed ourselves with our cell phone cameras, split up and had one hour to find the following items:
- A green sweater (both found it)
- Someone carrying a guitar (both found it)
- A pen that costs more than $20 (there is surprisingly no such thing in airports. An ice cream cone is more expensive than a pen in an airport.)
- A tattoo that doesn’t include flames (both found it)
- Someone eating a pretzel (I hung out by “Aunt Annie’s Pretzels” repeatedly in hopes to find this one, but didn’t get it. Jacob attempted to get this, but I said that taking a picture of YOURSELF eating a pretzel didn’t count, or I would have done it. He was eventually awarded half points.)
- The book “Love in the Time of Cholera” (both found it)
- The doppelgangers of Scott and/or Carrie Chapman. Extra points if you got both of them in the same picture. (Jacob found one of Carrie and was therefore awarded half points)
- an iPad (I found this! It took me a long time, but I finally spotted a flight attendant sitting in a restaurant with one on her table)
- An adult 4’6” or shorter (both got this, but it’s hard to prove it in a photo)
- A pair of skis (no luck for either of us.)
- A handlebar mustache (Jacob got it. I could NOT find this! I kept thinking “I’m in TEXAS, for heaven’s sake! There has to be SOMEONE here with a handlebar mustache!” But no luck.)
- A Mormon (no find, at least not noticeably)
- Someone both wearing chocos and carrying a bedroll (neither of us found this…a lot harder than we thought)
- Dreadlocks (both got it)
- A sombrero (I found this! I couldn’t believe it! This kid just walked past me with one)
- EXTRA CREDIT FIND FOR LIZ: A genuine Louis Vitton or Prada purse (no luck.)
- EXTRA CREDIT FIND FOR JACOB: Soundgarden or Spoon paraphernalia (no luck.)
Jacob beat me by one point, having found 9 items out of the 15, and I only found 8. It was super-fun, though.
• Learning that Jacob is really funny in the morning, mostly because he doesn’t remember anything that happened during it until hours afterwards. On Sunday morning, we handed off alarm clocks several times, wrestled over blankets and sleeping positions, and briefly discussed the morning so far and him taking over the bed. And when I mentioned all of this to him later, he didn’t remember any of it.

• The zipline! With Francisco and Grabin, who were fun. We pretended we were flying and saw some lizards and butterflies and it was a BLAST.




• The Fantastic World. We never actually WENT there, but we drove past it several times. It was a huge area in the middle of a field on the side of the road, full of nothing but bouncy castles. Yeah.


• Costa Rica. In general. (Both of these pictures were taken from right outside our hotel room.)


• Finishing everything up with a trip to the ER! Everyone is well now, but Jacob had some serious intestinal blockage that was causing him a lot of pain, and it was bad enough that we felt we needed help. He'd been in pretty severe pain since Saturday morning, so when things weren't better by late late Sunday night, off to the University of Utah Medical Center we drove! We were grateful he survived until we could get someplace where English was more common...I'm afraid my Spanish vocabulary doesn't extend to medical terms. And the ER was bizarrely a lot of fun. Maybe because it was 3 in the morning, or because we were so glad to finally get help, or because everyone was so friendly, but it was a good experience. We told one person that we'd just gotten back from our honeymoon, and then every other person who came into the room said "How was Costa Rica?" with a big smile. It was bizarre to be in the Emergency Room, being congratulated over and over again on our recent marriage. But after 2 hours, one made up (and yet unfinished) story about a kid named Oscar whose teacher is an alien, one X-Ray, one incident of Jacob being told that he's "full of s**t," and one bottle of magnesium citrate later, we left for our hotel. Driving home to Rexburg a few hours later was an adventure, but we made it with no disaster!


And there you have it! Once our house is really finally put together, we'll take some pictures of that and post them, but in the meantime, we are loving not having to part ways at curfew, not worrying about roommates, not having to go into other rooms to change clothes, waking up and cuddling every morning, and all the other wonderful things marriage brings!

Thanks Dad and Mary, for an incredible week in paradise. =)

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Pura Vida