Costa Rica, part 1: San Jose

So the blog has been pretty quiet. Mostly because January consisted mainly of two things: more snow and getting ready for Costa Rica. Mac and I left on Friday, Feb. 4th. We started our journey when a cab picked us up at 4:15am to get us to Princeton Junction for the 4:45 train to Newark International. It was an early morning, but I was so excited. Mac has Elite status on Continental, so check in went really smoothly and we had plenty of time to grab some breakfast before the flight. Here's a view of the sunrise from the airport:

The flight went well and getting through the airport was easy. Our first step was to shed some layers because we went from snow, wind, ice and cold to beautiful warm sun! We took a bus from the airport into San Jose and the whole time I had a ridiculous smile on my face because the weather was so amazing and the colors were so bright!


The bus dropped us off in the middle of San Jose and we walked maybe 10 or 12 blocks to our hotel. It was so funny, we didn't have a map open, but I knew what direction we had to go from looking at the map before. We walked and walked and some crazy American guy who told us he's from California but has lived in Costa Rica for 15 years, is a tour guide if we wanted to go anywhere (he showed us his license), owns part of a restaurant we should go to (he handed us a brochure), and that he grew hydroponic pot, even tried to help us with his version of directions. After a smile and a nod, a few blocks later we turned a corner and there was our hotel! It worked out perfectly.

The hotel wasn't much to see from the outside, but the inside was quite nice. We had a big room with a nice bathroom and right outside the room was this nice little sitting area. There was also a pool that we didn't use, but looked nice, and a hotel restaurant that we visited for dinner that was really quite good.

After a nap and showers we decided to head out and see some of San Jose. Here I am pointing to San Jose on a map of Costa Rica that was in the hotel. As you can see, we're in the Central Valley region with mountains all around us.

It was fun to walk around in a bustling city. We walked through some small parks and plazas on our way to the National Theatre. It was built in 1897 and houses murals and sculptures and still presents high-quality performances. We missed the last tour of the building, but did get to see the lobby and the outside of the building, which are beautiful.

Then we walked down to the National Museum, which is an amazing old building that has had many uses. It looks like a castle or a fortress on the outside, with bullet holes still visible from a long-ago uprising, but the inside is a lovely courtyard building with many open air exhibits. This is the view on the pedestrian street in front of the museum:

This is the courtyard inside the museum:

Here is one of the "hallways" surrounding the courtyard. The exhibits were all in open-air rooms surrounding the courtyard:

There was also a part of the building that was once an officer's home and they had parts of it set up to show how it would have worked as a residence. Here is an architectural detail on display that just ached for you to put your head through. I couldn't resist!

The Museum also had pre-Columbian artifacts including small gold figurines, huge stone spheres (as seen in the courtyard photo), and this nose flute!

After the Museum, we walked around looking for a little snack. It was getting to be rush hour at that point and the streets were packed and very noisy. There were little stands full of fresh fruit on almost every corner. The fruit in this country is outstanding!

But we ended up at a little bakery down the street from this church. While we were eating the bells started to ring and it was so loud, reverberating off of the buildings. We walked down the street and saw the church and the bells started to ring again, so here's a little video:



The church was right at the end of a pedestrian street, so we continued to walk along and just see the sights and the people and hear the sounds of the city. After being in sleepy, snowy Princeton, I felt like I was seeing with new eyes and hearing sounds I had never heard before! A few blocks from the church with the bells, we started hearing this unbelievable chattering noise and kept walking to figure out what it might be. Turns out it was parrots in the trees of the main square outside the Cathedral. We walked through the Cathedral (which was packed with people praying, for a Friday afternoon). Costa Ricans are some serious Catholics.

We came out of the church and saw hundreds, if not thousands of parrots in the trees. You can kind of see some of them at the top of the tree in this photo:

They are basically the same color as the leaves of the trees, so they're a little hard to see, but the most amazing part was the noise! You can get a small sense of it in this video:



After walking around for the entire afternoon, we were pretty pooped and ended up just staying at the hotel for dinner that night. The meal was fine, but the dessert was outstanding! Bananas flambe! The bananas in Costa Rica are basically local and super sweet! We enjoyed our dessert and some coffee and ended up going to bed early. Costa Rica seems to be on a fairly "early to bed, early to rise" kind of schedule, so it worked out well to get accustomed to this early in the trip.

Saturday started with a cab ride to the Costa Rican Art Museum, which was great! It's housed in a building that used to be the national airport and is situated at one end of the big park in the city. We walked around the building and saw these beautiful multi-colored trees before heading in to see the art:

It was a bit of a cloudy morning, so we didn't feel bad spending time inside a building. Can you believe this used to be the main airport the entire country? It's so teeny compared to airports today.

We spent a couple hours looking through the exhibits. It was so refreshing to be in a museum full of wonderful art, and not know any of the artists! It was like a new discovery around every corner.

This room was surrounded by a bas relief mural that depicted the history of Costa Rica, ending with the building of the airport, as seen in the upper right. When it was an airport, this room was used as the Diplomat's Lounge. It was really quite impressive.

I love how the two museums we went to in San Jose were both completely open air, with open windows and doors. It provided a much-appreciated breeze on a warm day and just made the whole experience more open and free-flowing. It was a nice change from the stuffy museums of the US and Europe. Below is a view out the back doors of the museum, into the outdoor sculpture garden:

We were also amazed that this museum charged no admission, had not gift shop, no cafe and the one little office we saw seemed to be the only "administration" that was on site at the museum. This didn't seem like a money-making venture at all, but instead it seemed to exist purely to exhibit and promote Costa Rican artists, past and present. It was really a nice way to start the day.

After the museum we went to the rental car office to pick up our car for the rest of our trip! It was a bit of a hassle getting through crowded San Jose. There were tons of cars and people all over the place. And with two major streets that just suddenly turn into pedestrian-only malls, it made it a little tricky and frustrating to navigate:

But once we were out of the city, it was fairly smooth sailing with tons of new views and sights to see on our way to the Tarrazu Region.