We had all heard horror stories about this checkpoint, so we were preparing ourselves for a two hour crossing. It was certainly a clusterfuck - people trying to sell fake immigration papers, pushy hawkers and vendors, a complete lack of useful signage - but we made it through in a record 30 minutes.
On the other side we parted ways, and I found a luxury bus headed for San Jose - the capital. The bus was coming from Granada in Nicaragua, and all the seats were already full, so I paid the driver half price to hitch a ride in the jump seat up front with him until someone else got off and I could take their seat. It was actually a lot more fun being at the front with a full view of the scenery out the windshield. I had been to Costa Rica before, but the scenery once again impressed me. Three hours later, I finally got a seat. Another four hours later, and we arrived in the capital.
The layout of the streets in San Jose is fairly straightforward. It's a grid for the most part. The only problem is that a lot of the streets don't have signage, so it takes a while to get oriented. I walked into a thrift store near where I thought my hostel should have been, and I asked them for directions to the address I had. None of the workers had any idea. They didn't even know what street they were on. Finally I asked them if they had heard of the hostel I was looking for, thinking it might have gone out of business - as many things have in my outdated Rough Guide (I'm never straying from Lonely Planet again) - but none of them had heard of it. I left the store without any answers, and I turned to walk up the street, only to find my hostel two doors down. Ridiculous.
I put everything down in my room and left to find the Panama embassy, but it had already closed (at 4pm), so I walked back into the center of the city to find an internet cafe before dinner. Around 8 o'clock I went back out to get some cheap food, but everything had already closed. Things close EARLY in Central America - it's hard to get used to. The only place open was a very authentic Mexican restaurant called "Taco Bell". I ate a cheesy gordita crunch and called it a night.
The next morning I went to catch a bus as early as possible - no reason to stay in the city. I ended up sitting next to a Belgian flight attendant, and we had a great time chatting on the four hour drive to Quepos on the coast. The roads out to the coast were much better than I remember from five years ago. I had the bus driver drop me off in front of the TEFL center where my friend Sage was taking an English-teaching certification course. I got there just in time for her lunch break and I caught her coming down the stairs with another girl, Jess, who I had also traveled with in Israel. They had just spent a few months in Argentina studying Spanish together, and they decided to get certified in Costa Rica to teach English. Sage is planning on being here for about five months to teach after her course is over.
After lunch, Sage went back to class and I walked down to the town of Quepos to grab some food and kill some time until she was done. As I was sitting in a little street side restaurant I saw "red alert" flashing on the television. It turns out that only four hours after I left San Jose there was a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that rocked the Central Valley, the capital, and a few other main cities. I got out just in time! The owner of the restaurant reassured me by saying "It's no big deal. We get earthquakes all the time." (That was an exaggeration.) I walked up to the beach where I sat down to read a book, and within 20 minutes I had already witnessed a 5-person drug bust and another guy get arrested for driving his motorcycle drunk. I decided to leave that part of town.
When I got back to the school to meet up with Sage I told everyone about the earthquake. None of them had felt it either, but as I talked to people over the course of the next few days it seemed like most other people had. Sage, her flatmate and I all hopped on a bus and went to their new apartment to drop off our stuff. For an incredibly reasonable price, they were living in a brand new two bedroom apartment with a huge kitchen and a rooftop pool with a view of the Pacific - walking distance to the beach and a 50 cent bus ride into either neighboring town -- awesome.We went into town to grab some dinner, and then we met up with a few of her classmates for drinks. As always, when you bring people together from around the world, you're bound to have some fascinating characters. Kelly was a girl from Boston who had been funding her world travels by dog sitting and entertaining rich housewives in the overly-wealthy suburbs where she lived. She had recently gotten back from a year or so of volunteering with AIDS victims in Zambia. Interesting girl. Even more out there - Steve was the son of American missionaries who had spent the past thirty years practicing medicine in Nigeria. He was born there and had been educated in international boarding schools since he was six. He went to a Christian college in the States, and then spent two years teaching English in Korea after he finished school. He had a perfect American accent, but could switch into Nigerian English on cue. Another very interesting character. Sage and Jess live in New Jersey and spend every summer working at a Jewish sleep away camp :) Conversation, consequently, was focused on four topics -- Africa, China, Korea, and Pennsylvania summer camp.
The next day while Sage was in class I met up with Paul, a realtor who has been working with my uncle to develop some beachfront property down the street from Sage's apartment. He gave me a tour of the nearly-completed condos, which are pretty spectacular. I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the beach.After Sage got out of class she came back to the apartment with a few of her classmates, and we made some rum and cokes and went to the rooftop pool to watch the sunset. We went to the grocery store across the street to pick up snacks and ingredients for dinner, and we made some kick-ass mango chicken before going down to Manuel Antonio for a beach bonfire and drinks.
We slept in today, and then I brought Sage down to the beach for the first time since she's been here. She had been too busy apartment hunting to actually see it before I came! We spent the rest of the day lounging, reading, listening to music, swimming, and getting sunburned.
Back at the apartment,
we once again went up to the rooftop with a bottle of wine to watch sunset, where we met crazy Dennis - a pony tailed redneck from Atlanta who told us ridiculous stories about traveling the world with his two girlfriends, and explained to us that after going EVERYWHERE in the world, he had determined that Costa Rica was the absolute best country. We made a great dinner of chicken breast sauteed in wine sauce, garlic butter linguine, and broccoli with cheese, and called it a night.Tomorrow is my last day with Sage, and then I'm headed over to the Caribbean side.
Pura vida.
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