Costa Rica Series: San Jose

If you have just somehow magically found this post, you might want to start at the beginning.

That being said, here we are at beautiful San Jose!  Or really, here we are at this gross city in the middle of this beautiful green country.  Yaaaay.

We saw several places during this trip, San Jose, the volcano at La Fortuna, the cloud forest in Monteverde,  the beaches of Quepos and Puerto Viejo, but we stopped in San Jose at the beginning, middle and end of our trip. We didn't spend a whole lot of time in city.  It was more of a "filling station," a place where we prepared for the other towns we visited.  The hotel where we stayed, Hotel Dona Ines, let us store luggage while we traveled in other parts of the country.  Because we stopped back in San Jose during the middle of the trip, we were able to switch out clothes and so forth, although looking back, none of us needed as much as we brought. 

This is the "view" from the front porch of the Hotel Dona Ines.  Nothing spectacular, although we spent a lot of time hanging out there at night, watching people walk by. In one of my journal entries from this trip, I referred to this porch as a "window to the world" because no one noticed us, they just kept on walking, going about their business. 

We did a few educational things while in San Jose.  Because this was, after all, a class geared toward teachers, we spoke with a professor at Universidad Internacional de Las Americas, which is a prestigious school in Costa Rica despite the eighties into music to their website. (Edit: Universidad Internacional de Las Americas MUST have found my comment here and immediately updated their website to not contain eighties intro music.  That must be the case as to why it's no longer there.)

I couldn't really tell you what we talked about now, but lets assume it was captivating.  What I do remember about that day is the actual school, all the students that were sitting outside eating, studying and just talking.  It looked a college campus, but one that you see in a movie during a "walking to class" montage.  This professor took us all to lunch, under the premise of showing us what a lunch meeting would be like in Costa Rica.  The place we went looked small, cute and local, but was not a place I would have gone on my own.  The food was amazing, I just never would have found it.  I don't think there was any signage.   

There were two lessons I learned in Costa Rica. The first, you can't wait for the rain. It's just going to rain there, suddenly. It might rain for five minutes or two hours, so you can't just wait it out.  People stand around in the street and sell umbrellas for two dollars when it's not raining, twenty dollars when it is (they do this in Paris too, it turns out).  If you don't have an umbrella, you know what else is handy? Trash bags.  

It would probably also be useful if this picture wasn't all blurry, but I still like it.  What's not to like about seven Americans wearing trash bags after leaving a nice restaurant?  Although, it looks more like someone's home patio.

The second lesson I learned was about money.  five U.S. dollars is about twenty five thousand CR colones.  If I remember correctly, the bills are in thousands.  For example, someone might say, "Do you have two thousand colones?" And you might say yes, and hand them a bill.  one thousand, five thousand, ten thousand... all types of bills.  The exchange rate is just off enough for people to rip you off if you use U.S. dollars, so we went to the bank to exchange our money.  This is where I encountered my problem with the best money belt in the world.

It really works well, so well that I couldn't get money out myself unless I went to the restroom. Are you curious? Okay, fine. I tell you. It's panty hose. you take a pair of panty hose and cut the legs off. Stick your money in the leg part, tie it low around your waist, under your pants and forget about it. No more embarrassing money belt necklaces or fanny packs (I never really wore those anyway). It is not easily accessible, but if it is just for emergency money and a copy of your passport, it doesn't need to be.  But make sure you go to the restroom if you need to get something out of it because it is not appropriate to dig around in your pants in public places, like Costa Rican banks without public restrooms.  Guards holding machine guns might look at you funny.

Actually, if I think about it, there was another lesson I learned in San Jose.  It's that no matter what I do, I will never have a good spanish accent. I spent hours looking for dominoes at souvenir shops so we could play on our trip. Did I know the spanish word for dominoes? No, but I figured it couldn't be that difficult to figure out or pantomime. I went to so many stores, asking, "Tiene dominos?  Tienan dominos?" No one understood me. I didn't find any until we stopped in San Jose the second time, mid trip.

Do you know what the Spanish word for dominoes is?  It's dominoes.  People just couldn't understand my accent.

The most fascinating thing about San Jose is that you could really see what "protesting" means in the country. Take this statue.  Some one graffitied it with a quote from Ghandi about tolerance. It reads "First  they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." I think that's about tolerance.  Anyway, in The States, you might see graffiti of people's names, or just plain junk.  In Costa Rica, it's quotes from Ghandi.  There is a better picture here.  

Another piece (actually, several pieces) of graffiti in the same area is anti George W. Bush. Here's a better picture, showing more of the words.   

Acording to this article from The Costa Rica News, there is politically motivated graffiti all over the city.  This one is my favorite found on the story webpage. It reads "Everyone is born wonderfully different."

This other image was taken by photojournalist Manoocher Deghati of Costa Rican school girls protesting the high number of trafic accidents in 1991.  It is really moving.

And, for now, that's all I have to say about San Jose.  I will probably include more information about the city in the post about Cafe Britt, which will be at the end of the series.  I hope you've enjoyed it!

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Costa Rica Series: The Beginning

Once upon a time (2005), in a land far, far away (Okay, so it was the same land) a girl (me) was just one semester shy of an MBA when she decided to study abroad. She fandangled her way into an elementary education course headed to Costa Rica for two weeks during August of that year.  How?  Luck, maybe, or preparedness. But really, here's how:

1) She and the course professor devised a way to relate the course to her business degree by including a comprehensive analysis of a business in Costa Rica. The Business: Cafe Britt, the most popular coffee producer in the country, the "Starbucks" of Costa Rica. 

The focus: The company's marketing strategies in a well established local market compared to marketing strategies used for recent expansion into global markets, including Peru and Japan, as well as a somewhat penetrated market in the United States (I'll need a five minute break after that sentence).  

Photo Credit: http://www.simplycoffee.com/marketing.php

2)  The girl then pitched the idea to the Dean of the School of Business (SCARY!) She must have answered all the questions correctly because he agreed to count the class as an elective for her degree plan. The girl, excited about her trip, tried to recruit her fellow business classmates. One by one, she got them interested. One by one, they met with the Dean. And one by one, he shot them down.

He only allowed one other student from the School of Business to count the class toward his degree program, provided he submitted the business report at the end. Why? Who knows. Maybe she caught the Dean on the right day, at just the right moment. Maybe it was her winning smile or maybe she had a better plan walking into the meeting than the other students (I like to think it's the latter). This is where the luck v. preparedness comes into play. Either way, the girl got her trip.

And so it was that on the first day of class, the girl met the other students with whom she would spend fourteen days in Costa Rica.  There were two forestry majors, an education/kinesiology major and two business majors.  

Dr. Armstrong, The Professor

Tamberly, The Almost Local

Bruce, The Corporate Slacker

Forgot this guy's name, but lets call him The Forest Ranger

Rodney (I think), but we'll call him The Coach

And that's me.

Welcome to the first installment of The Missing Travel Blogs and the first post in The Costa Rica Series, a collection of posts that will follow our merry gang through a small country in Central America, a land far, far away, once upon a time in 2005.  Beaches, rivers, mountains, volcanos, waterfalls, big cities, small towns, alligators, monkeys and even a little bit of learning... you name it, it's here.  Stay tuned.

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Chicken Gumbo, Yo

Something new!  Something successful! I kicked off two of my 2011 things to accomplish last night with this Chicken Gumbo Soup from a cookbook that my mom gave me for Christmas, Simply Soup. First, it was a new recipe, made in an allergy friendly manner. Second, I froze four servings to eat later. Although I had to send Husband to the store for okra and an onion, I'm still proud of myself!

This was no wheat day, so I used Rye flour instead of all-purpose flour and was a little scared that the substitution would ruin the soup, but it was still pretty good.  You know, I didn't even think to research what type of flour would be best (besides regular) for soups.   It is intimidating how many different types of flour are out there.  I purchased soy, rye and brown rice flour from my country bumpkin Kroger last week, so just think what you would be able to get at a "real" grocery store.

A note on the meat - I bought a carton of chicken broth to use, but it was only 4 cups. Because I used boiled chicken breasts, I was able to use an extra cup of the "chick breast stock" to make the full 5 cups.  Also, Husband grilled the garlic sausage the previous night and it did not taste good at all. But the flavor really came out when it was cooked in the soup, so don't judge the garlic sausage if you've never had it.  It was the perfect thing, and the best part of the soup in my opinion.

Other changes to the recipe: I added a can of kidney beans with the tomatoes and used brown rice rather than white rice. I also dosed the gumbo with chili powder at the last minute. And because bell peppers are not on the list of things to eat for the next month, no green bell peppers for this girl's gumbo. I had a severe allergy attack just cutting a poblano pepper the other day. Really, I'm not kidding. You woulda thought I was chopping giant mutant venomous jalapaños (Why does spellcheck want to change that to Galapanos?).

I take my sugar straight, please.

I'm up early, sipping on espresso that is sweetened with Truvia rather than raw sugar because today is not sugar day.  it just doesn't feel right, but such is the way of the Rotation diet. Considering I gorged on raw cane sugar cubes Sunday night, I don't think it's a very good idea to cheat "just this once."  

Even though I really, really want to.  Really, really bad.  

I've always had a thing for sugar.  When I was little, my Poppy (an affectionate term for Grandfather) hid me under the kitchen table, table cloth and all, with the sugar bowl and a spoon.  I remember sitting on that linoleum floor, watching people walk around me, listening to the footstep sounds of the old house while spoonfuls of sugar dissolved in my mouth. It's not that bad, really, when you consider that my cousin had a thing for peanut butter and butter sandwiches on white bread, extra butter.  Hey, don't judge.  We were quite happy with the butter and the sugar.  Gran still calls me her "Sugar Bowl Angel."  She still keeps a jar of maraschino cherries in the fridge for me, but that's a whole other obsession.

Sugar cubes may be my biggest weakness.  No need for a spoon!  Just a nice, little compact piece of sugar.  Granted, I haven't eaten sugar cubes straight in quite a while, excluding last Sunday.  Well, that's a lie.  Up until the Rotation Diet, I would sneek one or two everytime I walked by the pantry.  I can't help myself.  Even in public.  Even in fancy restaurants.  If you've got sugar cubes on your table, I'm eating them with my fingers, whether I'm eight or twenty eight.  

Like last March, the In-laws took Husband and I skiing in Canada.  We spent the last night in a fancy Vancouver hotel, which I swore to revisit.  When we showed up at the hotel restaurant for breakfast, that hotel, that sweet little thoughtful hotel, had sugar cubes on the tables in cute little bowls with cute little tongs.  And yes, I ate them with my fingers, too.  

People always scrunch up their noses when they find me out, but everybody has some kind of weird food thing they can't shake.  Husband eats frozen waffles with peanut butter and syrup.  Cousin, the peanut butter and butter sandwich.  Even Boss has an obsession with stale Peeps (those gross little marshmallow candies).  What's your crazy food thing?

A Champion Juicer!

Just like everyone else that has a blog or a person to talk to,  I've made a list of New Year's Resolutions.  You can see them here if you are interested.  But in other news, look what I can do with my Champion Juicer! We first leaned about Champion juicers on our trip to Kauai this past summer when we got banana ice cream from Banana Joe's Fruit Shack. 

Banana Ice Cream!  But we needed ripe bananas.  We've got some ripening on the kitchen table for the next batch.

Soy Cherry and Banana Ice Cream!  Mostly Cherries.  I intended to make cherry juice but left the wrong parts on the juicer, so I got homogenized cherries.  This ice cream was so much better than the first batch. 

It will also make nut butter.  AND there is a separate attachment that can be used to make flour from grains, oats, rice, etc.  Isn't that crazy?  This thing makes flour!  Husband and I are both really excited about this new addition to our kitchen.  I have no idea what we will make next! Oh wait, I do.  More banana ice cream.