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Hi, all. I’m trying to be realistic about how well Costa Rica will suit my husband. Here in the States, Fry’s Electronics is probably his favorite store. He has a lot of electronic equipment, and he gets a lot of pleasure/stimulation/utility from his GPS(es), laptop, shortwave radio (or whatever it’s called), and other electronic gear. He’s upgraded my PC more times than I can tell you by buying parts either locally, on Ebay, or from an online seller’s site. As you might imagine, he spends a lot of time on line and is accustomed to streaming video (though I’m sure he could live without that particular thing), building web sites, uploading/downloading BIG files, etc. So, my question is this: Is he doomed to be frustrated and unhappy in CR? I’m sure some of you expats are techies too. What’s your experience been? Can a techie be happy in CR? Thanks so much for any info you care to share.
Best wishes,
JonnyAs a techie and a software developer I can tell you there is nothing close to a Fryes in Costa Rica. There are some decent stores but be prepared to to pay up to double for items that are up to a year behind that you find in the US. Fortunately most electronics are relatively small and when you travel back to the US you can load up your suitcases. That’s what I do and it satisfies my techie cravings. Also Internet may not be all that reliable which seems to only go down when you need it most. Generally it is getting better in urban areas. Hope that helps.
Virtually anything you can buy online from a U.S. etailer is available here in Costa Rica. Aerocasillas, JetBox and maybe others offer transshipping service for both mail and packages. They’ll give you a south Florida (typically Miami) post office box address and a street address to which mail and packages can be sent. Especially if you use the post office box as your “official” address for credit card accounts, the etailers can’t tell the difference.
Of course, Aerocasillas and the rest do charge for their services and they’re not cheap, but they’re cheaper than flying back to the States.
You can also rely on the combination of the U.S. Postal Service and the Costa Rican Correo for mail and package delivery. Not having used them, I can’t offer a comment, but our Aerocasillas service has been just fine.
Our CR Wi-Fi wireless Internet service (2mb down/1mb up) is generally very reliable. Friday an electrical storm knocked out one of our radios, but they had it up and running in about twenty hours. That’s our first outage in a very long time.
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