San Jose (the one in Costa Rica) Silliness

Hello, dear blog readers, I didn't see you come in.

So after ending up in a wrong contient (see Feb 07), Emergency Medical trips and other acts of G-d, we finally ended up in San Jose, C.R! on Sunday.

We arrived in San Jose and after some gajooling and a 80's music themed cab ride (apparently Billy Ocean is the G.O.A.T to Ticos) we arrived and found our hostel. Brian neglected to remember the name of the hostel he booked so we scurried down the streets of downtown S.J, were inundated with American Tourists and offers of special fun (not sure whether they were offering us prositutes, weed or some weird Tico fusion of the two), we found an internet cafe.

Some quick obsevations about S.J:
1. Street Names and addresses are seemingly non-existant, instead its all about distance from a a major landmark I.E. 200 metres away from the Karantonis Hellenic Sandwich Shoppe.
2. American Fast Food is King!! Everywhere we went we saw KFC, Burger King, McDicks and every other greasy artery clogger produced by these United States. And they were almost entirely populated by Ticos.
3. Dusty and Grimey. This is certainly not one of the more awe-inspiring capital cities I have ever been to but it served its purpose as a jumpoff to the more interesting sites in C.R


Attempting to avoid eating our first meal of the trip in a KFC (what is this, the great wall or something???) We decided to eat at a Chinese-Tico restaurant called Chan Chan or something like that. Simply put the food was neither Chinese, nor Tico and far from good. But after 8 hours travelling and wandering aimlessly it went down easy washed down by some Imperial Cervecas.

Our Hostel was RULED by cats. The owner had a single grey tabby who got knocked up by a tico alley cat and produced 4 adorable kittens, who at the time of our visit were 6 weeks old. They spent there days jumping on backpackers (myself included) sleeping in flowerpots/my shoes and generally living an adorable catsistence (patented Jesse Todres, 2008). Despite their ready cuteness the owners of the hostel were overwhelmed by the amount of cats and even offered one to us as a trip mascot.

The next day we got up early to see the 'sites'. Not much here folks. Apparently the best cultural site is the jade museum but only two years divorced from my lankyjewinasia days, Im still pretty jaded about the precious stone(ba dum dum).

We visited the city centre, took pictures of cows (San Jose has a cow project similar to the Moose project in Toronto in the late 90's) ate pollo frito in a local market while watching the Euro Cup and then dashed home to avoid one of the hardest downpours I've ever seen.

After 3 hours of intense rain, we ventured out to find dinner, but again we were surrounded by either over priced tourist traps (one was actually called Cancun, ugh) and the Colonel's benevolent smile, we decided to hop into a very nice-looking shopping centre. There we played mid 90's arcade games and I managed to find a nice spaghetti and pepper dish for $1.60.

The next day we got up at 5:15, thanks to help from a roomate whose homestay experience teaching english was cut short when the house she was staying at was destroyed in a mud slide and then got to our next destination, Manuel Antonio Park (incidentally this was the very same park, that on our first trip to 'San Jose' when we were discussing how to get to it from San Jose, we were kindly informed by the stewardess "... but that's in Costa Rica)

Spicily Yours
Jesse