Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

Sometimes I don't want to come back...

• San José has lots of street vendors. Umbrellas, jewelry, artwork, batteries, coloring books, fruit, you name it. I assume this is all legal as no one seems to act shady about any of this. On my walk to work this morning I bought a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice from a guy working a shopping cart full of oranges with an orange press on top. It was good, real good, & cheap too. I'm wondering why I hadn't tried it sooner.


• Over the weekend Ellie & I went to Orosi to visit the hot springs there. Sadly the water wasn't that hot. When we asked about this we were told the water's hotter in December & January. Interestingly that's the middle of Costa Rica's summer. This makes the "hot springs" sound a lot like a pool if I've got to wait for the sun to warm the water. Even without hot water it was a nice trip, not too far away & the scenery was incredible going into that valley.
  Anyway, we got a lead on another spring nearby that's said to have hot water, we'll see...


• So as my sprained ankle is slowly healing & we still don't have internet access in our apartment yet I've been reading things the old way. Originally it was a Spanish text book that Ellie brought along, but for the last 2 weeks it was The DaVinci Code. From time to time I wonder why I don't read more fiction & now I understand. A bad movie or mediocre television program can only steal 2 hours of my life from me. I don't think it was a bad book, but I cared more about the facts of the fiction than I did the story or the characters. Maybe I'll like the movie more?


• It costs less than US$5,000/year to go to University here! I think my college plan for my kids will consist of "learn spanish." Yeah, I'll invest in my kid's future through Univision & train rides to Spanish Harlem before sending them south of the border to get their learn on...


• I've also been reading about Costa Rica's business environment this week: low taxes, and it's easy to set-up & run a business here (I can think of @ least 3 tech businesses I could run).


• I was talking to a co-worker today who's been doing the "transient english teacher" thing for a while & I can really see the appeal of the lifestyle: foreign travel, learning a new language (or languages), experiencing different cultures, etc. I could get used to those perks.

Let's see if I still feel like this in June...

Kepfram

Memories of Nicaragua:
It's been about a month since we did our border run to Granada, here's what happened...

I like to sleep. Most of the time I don't get enough sleep, not because I'm a light sleeper or have insomnia, I just refuse to go to bed @ anything approaching a reasonable hour. This quirk occasionally pays off when I stay up all night to do something in the early morning like helping us get to the bus station downtown by 4am.

I remember the bus ride to Granada like this: I got on the bus, I woke up @ the Nicaragua border, went through customs, then watched about 3/4 of Cheaper By the Dozen on the bus before getting off in Granada. Ellie tells me it was a long ride to the border.

On our walk from the bus stop to our hostel we saw a street bull, an unclaimed bull just trotting down the street, apparently this is normal. We also saw a horse grazing along the riverbank in town, some loose chickens, & 3 goats chilling on the sidewalk @ one point. There were lots of horse carts, handsome cabs, & stray dogs on the streets too.

In addition to street animals Granada has a lot of street children, kids who've ended up homeless & make a living panhandling or peddling candy & other things. I thought it was really sad, but like I wrote before: Nicaragua is really poor, which is kinda what creates the problem, some people can't afford to have children so they put them on the street.

We visited a shelter for street kids outside of Granada that Ellie's friend Taleigh had worked with when she was doing social work in Nicaragua a few years back, but none of the kids were there that afternoon. Everybody was off playing fútbol that day. We did look around the grounds though, we checked out the buildings, the hillside view of Lake Nicaragua & the little islands just off the shore. It was really pretty.

Just like in real life, I talk too much. I'm going to let Ellie finish writing about Nicaragua (she was there too you know)....:One of the hostels in Granada has nightly movies (a room with a TV & DVD player, and 1 or 2 movies every night). We saw Maria Llena de Gracia (for the 2nd time) & since we were the only guests I tried to have us watch it without the subtitles, but Kepfram caved after the 1st 15 minutes, so we had watch it with them turned on. No matter, it was still a great movie.

This same hostel proportedly rents bicycles, however this was unfortunately not to be. Perhaps it was because we went during the off (read "rainy") season (although it didn't rain as much in Nicaragua as it had been in San José), but although they did seem to have 2 bikes, only 1 seemed half decent, and neither had locks - so since the risk of them getting stolen was high (if we decided to stop anywhere during our day out), that they discouraged us from taking them.

I was really disappointed. We'd planned to explore the countryside outside of Granada (our plan was to go to Laguna de Apoyo) & I'd been REALLY missing biking. I'm not too interested in trying it here in Costa Rica - the roads around here are crowded with cars which don't attend to traffic laws (as we've mentioned), and you'd have to get quite far out of town to find a place deserted enough to enjoy. In Nicaragua there were TONS of bikes (and horses) on the roads, and very few cars.

So we stayed in town all weekend, which wasn't all bad. We loved the city - the oldest city in the Americas - founded in 1524. There is some incredible architecture (something definitely lacking in San José), and the people we met were much friendlier and more open than we've generally experienced in Costa Rica.

We walked around a lot, people watched, took a ton of pictures, spoke a lot of Spanish with the folks at our hostel, met an old friend of my friend Taleigh's & took a tour of the street kid's shelter that Kepfram mentioned above, looked at Lago Nicaragua (although we didn't go for the boat tour this time). It was quite a pleasant 3 days all told.

We stayed at a small hostel & language school named La Siesta run by some friends of friends. The place was really cute with several open courtyards with huge lovely plants (frequently visited by hummingbirds who might also flit around inside the room you were sitting in before exiting from whence they came).

Our hosts were a young married couple who'd just opened the place a few months before. Marcela is Nicaraguan by birth, but spent the last 10-15 years in Costa Rica with her family (who still live here), Boris is French, but met Marcella while teaching French in Costa Rica.

In Granada (which they say they prefer to San José), they host travelers and give 1 on 1 language classes (in either French or Spanish) to their guests & others. Truly great people & a great place to say (remember that for your next trip)....

We're mentioned how much we love shopping in the markets here in Costa Rica. Not true in Granada! Perhaps it was the lack of refrigeration in central market - but endless cramped aisles with tons of warm meat sitting & stinking on wooden chopping blocks.... It turned my stomach, and I hadn't really felt my first world sensibilities get in the way of appreciating and enjoying my experiences here until then.

Needless to say we were less apt to enjoy eating meat in restaurants after seeing how much of the meat was stored (luckily Kepfram had already eaten his steak dinner when we saw the market - and raved about it too - and since neither of us got sick, so it's all good, right?).

I should say we enjoyed good food while in Granada: a Waffle breakfast, an evening snack over drinks (Sangria for me & "flor de Jamaica" - or rather sorrel!! - for Kepfram) at one of the more expensive restaurants overlooking the towns large central square (remember expensive is in comparison to other restaurants in town, this place was nice & dirt cheap), & an elaborate Italian meal with our fellow guests & hostel hosts on our final night in town.

¡La proxima vez te juro que escribiré en español!