It has been sometime since I wrote an entry, but I promise to be good and enter blog entries on a regular basis from now on, Scout's honor.

If you've been watching the news from here lately, a lot has been happening.

The most onerous thing has been the passage of the new law that discriminates against men, making it a crime to even insult your girlfriend or wife. I personally believe this will be found unconstitutional by the Sala IV, as this discriminates against men and leaves the door open for women to denounce men for insults as a form of revenge. I certainly hope this is the case, because this is a very bad piece of legislation.

At least the rains have been holding steady, replenishing the reservoirs. I have even noticed the water coming out of the tap has been somewhat colder lately, no doubt because of all of the new water added to the reservoirs.

In other news, it was announced yesterday that Costa Rica was, sadly, breaking off diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of China. It was a sad day for Taiwan, that's for sure.

It was also announced yesterday that the Banco de Costa Rica [BCR] was delaying the issuance of licenses and passports at its branches until July 1. Then, it will start with 10 branches and eventually expand that to 30 or so by the end of the year.

This should shorten lines at Immigration and the DMV someday. That's sorely needed, because instead of catching up on its workload, immigration is, reportedly now issuing appointments for AUGUST OF 2008 if you can believe it.

When Arias issued the automatic extensions late last year to residency cedulas, the intent was to shorten the waits and lines. Instead, it seems they have gotten further behind. Now, your renewal may be expired before you even get it.

This is an incredible mess, and hopefully the BCR strategy will work, becuase they will ultimately renew residency cedulas there as well. We can contrast this mess with Panama, where, supposedly, it only takes a matter of days to get some of this done instead of years.

But of course, all is not hunky dory in Panama either these days. On May 25 they passed a new law to issue only 30 day instead of 90 day visas to tourists, and it seems they want to start a witch hunt against so called "PT's".

Costa Rica gave up that stupid idea about 2 years ago, but it seems like bureaurats have nothing better to amuse themselves with than interference in people's lives, making them complicated.

Personally, I think people should be free to go wherever they want in the world without hassles, but then that idea isn't so popular with many.

Governments worldwide need to get out of the way ane let people live freely so that we can all enjoy life as much as possible on this planet.

By the way, we are working more on the community project, and we are about to make our debut in YouTube video with a new Costa Rica program. It will be a program filled with news and views and features from Costa Rica. We want this to be a FUN program everyone can enjoy, and it might even contain some entertainment segments.

If you have any program ideas, or would like to showcase your talent or idea, we plan to make this into a regular series. Please go to our So Ya Wanna Move to Costa Rica page and register your interest by sending us an email to Customer Service.

http://www.soyawannamove.com

We are also gearing up to provide top notch tours of Costa Rica. We will be appealing to some audiences not currently served, such as those on a budget, those who are interested in alternative therapies, organic food, and all of that healthy stuff.

So keep on visiting our page to keep up to date on what's happnin'. We also now have LOTS of classified ads, so give that a look too.

See you next week.