People have wanted to know some of the little details of how I live. Like what type of place I’ve been living in and what I do all day, stuff like that.

I was thinking how facts of the mundane are valuable. I remember wanting to know the very specifics of how my grandparents lived. What colors were their clothes when they were kids (because all their photos were black and white)? What type of food did they eat (because it was before supermarkets)? Their life was foreign to me, and I wanted to experience that different time and place, in my mind, as accurately as possible. And I ask the same of friends or family who have lived differently than I. Maybe it’s something in our human instincts or genetics that needs to learn the mechanics of survival in different situations, and so there’s an in-built fascination.

For your curiosity, I’m posting a four-part series that shares some mundane facts of how I’ve been living the past few months out here in the jungle. Here’s a shorty for part 1:

I live in a 300-square foot wooden cabin (see pic above). It is situated in secondary jungle (used to be farm land) on a plot about 100 yards from the ocean.

[My path to the beach^]

It’s on Costa Rica’s remote Osa Peninsula – the body of water is the Golfo Dulce to be precise. If I’m standing on the beach out front, I am facing east-southeast, and can watch the sun rise over the sea (the gulf). The sun sets on the other side of the peninsula, which is essentially uninhabited because it’s mostly national parkland.

[^My front-yard beach. The main cover photo for my blog shows the sunrise view from another spot on this beach.]

The cabin is just one room, with a queen-size bed (covered in mosquito netting), a wooden bench, and two 5-foot-high bookshelf-type structures, one locking to store valuables.

[Inside my cabin]

The cabin has two half-solid walls, wood on bottom, and screens on top, to the ceiling. It has a small water closet, with a toilet and a sink. And I have a small bedside table.

[View from my bed^]

There is no A/C, just a floor fan. – Everything here is powered completely by solar, no grid-electricity whatsoever on the peninsula. – There are two fluorescent light bulbs, one for the main room, one for the water closet. And I have one electrical outlet from which I run one extension cord to power the fan and recharge my computer and cell phone.

We do get Internet out here. Although there are no towers nearby, we snag the signals from across the gulf and amplify them. It gets spotty, especially on rainy days, but it works pretty well.

That’s enough for now. Next post, I’ll give practical details related to how I eat.