Procrastinet

Costa Rica, Day 1 - 3/15/06: Settling In

filed under: Despatches

[For those who tune into Procrastinet's Despatches exclusively for Nick's notes from Amman - stay tuned, hopefully there will be more soon. In the meantime, I'm hijacking the category for our travel notes from Costa Rica. Hope you like 'em!]

The alarm went off at 2:00 a.m.

I dimly remember, when I was a child, having to get up early for special events – field trips, vacations, whatever – and being able to ride the adrenaline and come shooting out of bed.

That still works. But much more slowly.

By about 2:30 we were fully awake, with bags sitting by the door, ready to wake up Max and get on our way. “Okay, family,” I cried, “let’s go to Costa Rica!” Max was a trooper – he’d already gotten five and a half hours of sleep at that point, and has been hyped about the trip for months (“Where we going in March, buddy?” “Costa WEEKA!”)

There’s no traffic on Ocean Avenue at 2:45 a.m., so we made good time towards JFK. The turnoff for the Belt Parkway isn’t clearly marked, so we got a little lost for a moment. Still in Brooklyn and already getting lost: a bad sign that I didn’t have the foresight to notice.

It was the kind of cold that gives you an ice cream headache walking to the AirTrain in the long term parking lot. New York was making sure we didn’t mind leaving.

Check in went smoothly, as did security. We got to our gate at 4:00 a.m. for our 5:15 flight. We were flying LACSA, the Costa Rican part of Grupo Taca airlines. It was great – good legroom, nice flight attendants, and excellent coffee.

We landed fifteen minutes early. Bravo LACSA!

Customs and immigration was easy, and we quickly found ourselves blinking into the stuffy hot Costa Rican morning. A helpful guy who looked like a biker and who had no formal affiliation with the airport pointed us to our car rental shuttle contact, and didn’t try to shake us down in any way. The car rental shuttle guy was an outrageously good looking man, who asked if we spoke Espanol. I said we didn’t.

Lisa later pointed out that she, in fact, does – some – and accused me of not wanting her to talk to the hot Latino. She may have a point. But mostly, I was trying to work through the discomfort of being somewhere I don’t speak the language – in case you didn’t notice, I like to talk. I had crammed with the phrase book on the flight down, but two hours of reading doesn’t engender much fluency.

Even so, maybe because Spanish is so like French, and maybe just because I’m stubborn and arrogant, I kept feeling like I should be able to speak Spanish, and therefore kept trying to be the one who talked for us throughout the trip. I met with mixed success.

We rented our car, a Daihatsu Terios. I’m convinced “Terios” is Japanese for “rollerskate.” It’s the smallest car in the world (in Jeremy Clarkson’s typically hilarious review, he claims he once misplaced his under a leaf), and we discovered on our first speed bump that, to save money, the engineers cleverly eliminated the suspension, instead welding the axles directly to the chassis.

My cousin Joe said that in his experience with Costa Rica, everyone will give you excellent, detailed, easy to follow directions and then leave out one absolutely vital piece of information. Like: “Go until you see a gas station, then turn left. Exactly five hundred meters later, take the first right at the corner with the grocery store. Seven hundred meters after that, make a left just past the big red building. Then turn right and you’re there.” And later it will turn out that the last right turn was after thirty-seven minutes, down a dirt road, hidden between two bushes with a cow standing across it.

So we missed our turn and ended up farther into downtown San Jose than we were supposed to be. Luckily, San Jose is laid out on a grid, with numbered Avenidas running East/West and numbered Calles running North/South, with Avenida Central and Calle Central as the x/y axis down the middle. Even numbered Avenidas are south of Central, odds north. Even numbered Calles are west of Central, odds east. Pretty straightforward.

Or would be, if any of the streets had street signs. Some do – but only once every four or five streets, and usually the size of a postage stamp, mounted high up on the side of a building, under a helpful awning or poster.

When we figured out we were at Avenida 10 and Calle 10, the passing similarity to NYC helped me get my bearings. “Oh,” I said, “we’re at 10th and 10th.” Somehow everything seemed easier after that.

We checked in at the Radisson, just north of downtown and hopped in a cab to go get lunch ($2 for an eight minute ride). From a brief perusal of the travel books, I was under the impression that Avenida Central, which is pedestrians-only in the middle of town, was the same thing as Mercado Central, the Central Market, which was supposed to be pretty nifty and full of fruit stands and tchotchke shops and food stands.

So I was confused when we got off at the Plaza de la Cultura and found Avenida Central to look mostly like Fulton Street at lunchtime – people wandering aimlessly among discount clothing stores.

Of course, Fulton Street rarely has giant puppets frightening children or loafing around on benches:

We had heard that you could get along on US$ if you had enough smaller bills, but we decided we were more comfortable with colones. I was under the (correct) impression that you could use a US bank card at any ATM and withdraw in the local currency. So I found a Banc Nacional ATM cluster and put in my card. All was well: it asked me if I wanted English or Spanish. I chose English, and it went on – speaking in Spanish.

It asked me how much money I wanted, in “multiples of 1,000 colones” (this was in Spanish). So when I went to type in 50,000 ($100), didn’t know if I was asking for 50,000 colones or 50,000 x 1,000. I was very nervous. I needn’t have worried – the machine, and three more in the same kiosk, rejected my request time after time.

We had one $100 bill, so I changed that at a cambio booth.

At Avenida Central and Calle 6, we found the actual Mercado Central – a big, warehouse-y building with a narrow warren of stalls and food stands:

Restaurante Be-Du looked like a tiny, enclosed diner, with waitresses and booths, so we picked it and sat down:

The waitress came by and left us little pieces of paper with the menu items pre-printed next to check boxes. At first I thought we were supposed to fill them out ourselves, like a supply requisition – but it became clear that these were, in fact, the menus. When she made our way back to us, we managed to order, despite several moments where she lectured us in Spanish and we had to sort of smile and nod and hope we hadn’t just agreed to something awful.

It’s my theory that the absolutely best approach to a new city, especially in a new country, is to get as quickly as possible to someplace that serves food – it doesn’t matter where, or how nice – and order some, and then sit tight, look around, catch your breath, and take it all in. The tension of finding your way through an unfamiliar menu and ordering in an unfamiliar language (or accent) eases instantly into a huge rush of well-being, the euphoria of being somewhere and experiencing something entirely new. I’m convinced you have to be sitting down, with food on the way and, for the moment, nowhere to go, to experience it fully.

We had been warned that standard Costa Rican fare consists largely of rice and beans – we hadn’t been warned that it also provides massive plates of extremely tasty food for practically nothing. Lisa’s plate of the day included rice, beans, chicken, shredded cabbage, friend plantains and fresh fruit juice – for $2. My olle carne was a big slab of cow with rice, beans, a masterfully fatty golden soup, and every root vegetable known to man – some of them plainly inedible (like the potato-like beasts that were mostly gray as if fungal) but many of them delicious. Squash, yucca, whatever – they were great. Liberally slathered with salsa lizano, the omnipresent local Tabasco-substitute, it was simply fantastic.

It was also $2. In fact, if I hadn’t ordered us a fruit salad while thinking I was ordering a fruit drink (remember what I said about insisting on doing the talking without any Spanish?), we would have stuffed ourselves for less than $8.

Max knocked out in his stroller, and we wandered Avenida Central aimlessly until he woke up, had some helado at Pop’s (best coffee shake EVER), and witnessed the mugging of an African explorer by Zulu tribesmen, who then handed out Hellman’s Mayo. Strange.

We took a cab back to the hotel, the jolly cab driver bantering with us in Spanish about the “Gran Mama” whose medal he kept on his dash, and helpfully pointing out the midget we walked past (“Esta hombre es mas poco!” he shouted with delight).

Procrastimom joined us at the hotel, and we killed some time before heading out to dinner at Café Mundo, a Fodor’s choice which sounded lovely and was within ten blocks, with – said the guidebook – on site parking. Of course, I got us lost leaving the hotel, and then we couldn’t quite decipher the map and went around the block about ten times before we found it. Even then, there was no parking in evidence, so we parked on the street (a San Jose no-no) within view of the bouncer/hosts at the front of the restaurant.

Café Mundo is one of the most beautiful restaurants I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the food was somewhere in quality between Friday’s and a really good wedding hall – edible, but mass-produced and generic. It was populated mostly with tourists, clearly on the Fodor’s say-so, and we were put in a side room with another American family with a 2 ½ year old. Lucky waitress. Max knocked out on the big bench seat within ten minutes anyway.

Mediocre food, to be sure, but the drinks were strong and cheap, the prices were good, and the front patio and inside dining rooms were hauntingly beautiful. Not a bad evening, overall.

Back at the hotel we dumped Max unceremoniously in his crib (which he took to just fine, despite having been in a “big boy bed” at home for six months) and passed out at about 9 pm, to recharge for our big tourist day – Day 2 – which was slated to start with a 6:00 a.m. wake up call.

All we’d seen were the mountains from the air, and the cramped, poorly marked streets of downtown San Jose. But it was already clear we were going to like Costa Rica very, very much.

Posted by rjt at March 22, 2006 03:06 PM