Back from the rich coast

Guess what? We went to Costa Rica for the weekend! Why? Because it was cheap! Ellie found an amazing deal to go down there for four days, flight and hotel, for under four hundred clams (under 200,000 colons [Costa Rican money {Christopher Columbus' last name in Spanish}]) and, boy, was it worth it. We stayed in San Jose which is sort of in the middle of the country which means that we had to take day trips out to other pieces of the country. We arrived Friday night after only about six hours on two planes and one layover. Tired and hungry we left our hotel in search of dinner. Unfortunately we didn't have any colons at the time and didn't know any Spanish, or very little Spanish. So we walked around a little bit and decided to eat at one of the many Burger Kings we saw in the country. We made that decision based on the fact that they took my master card. It was a bad decision; the meat tasted weird, so after that we didn't eat any more American based fast food.

Day two we went our to the beach. Because we didn't know any better we took the scenic route, which wasn't bad, but slow. By doing this we saw a lot of small towns and went over a bunch of mountains and things on sometimes very scary roads including this bridge:



We safely made it to a beach but the sun lazily didn't show up





The rain started falling and it chased us back to the car. It did it's damage cause we were soaked by the time we got back. We thought there was damage on the rental car we had too cause when we started driving the whole car would start shaking. We had no idea what was going on. It wasn't a flat tire or anything obvious to two people who don't know much about cars. We looked pretty hard around the car and couldn't find anything so we decided to find the nearest office of the rental agency. But on the way Ellie, who was driving, noticed that the hand brake was still on. I laughed and laughed. She didn't so much, but it was still pretty funny.

The next day we went to see a volcano. The roads going there were friendlier than the ones from the day previous so we got there in good time. This day was sunny and it got hot and humid. It was better than rain though. Here's some pics:



Here's the volcano. I've been told that we were lucky to see the top of it. Most of the time it's said to be covered by clouds. So we were happy.



We drove to the base of it in the national park and hiked around to a recent lava flow.



It was pretty cool. It was also nice to walk around a bit cause we were in the car quite a bit to get to these places.

After we got back to San Jose we got hungry. It happens. So we look in a travel book to find a good place to eat and head out to find it. The thing about San Jose is that they don't name their streets; they do number them but they don't post those numbers often enough to know where one stands. It took awhile but we but we found the place we were looking for (it was raining pretty hard, btw) but it wasn't what we thought it would be (it was a crappy casino restaurant) so we went down the street and found an Irish Pub. It looked fine inside. I ordered a Reuben sandwich thinking I was going to get a hearty piece of food. I have never been more wrong in my life. It was the worst reuben ever. I don't even want to talk about it, but suffice it to say that it only had one thin piece of meat and no sauerkraut. Maybe that was the night before, but it happened and it sucked.

Finding stuff in that town was hard. I just remembered that the reuben was the night before. The volcano night we hired a taxi to take us to a restaurant we saw in the book. So we go down to the lobby of the hotel and ask for a taxi. Somehow we get some guy who wants to be our taxi (not really a taxi) and we're trying to tell him where we want to go, but they don't name their darn streets and they don't assign numbers to the businesses. He still wanted the address. So we did a lot of pointing and we finally got through to each other and we were off. It was kind of weird, and I'll admit that i was a little scared when he took us down this dark alley way in the opposite direction we wanted to go, but we soon got around to where we wanted to go. We didn't find our restaurant but found a good Italian place.

So now it's Monday, our last full day in the country. We were a little tired of driving so we spent the day walking around San Jose. I bought a Costa Rican bike jersey with bike shorts as my souvenir. Ellie got a bunch of stuff to for her and her family and friends. It was a nice day, not too rainy, but nothing touristy was open, like a few museums that we wanted to check out. It was okay, we had fun walking around checking out the local shops.



That's basically it. I did buy the new Stephen Colbert book and read it on the trip and I do declare that it was a good read. It gets my seal of approval.

thanks for reading.