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| The national beer of Costa Rica. This logo is on signs everywhere. |
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Dinner
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| Pasta salad, fried plantain, a hamburger patty, and picadillo. The picadillo is like a hash and this one is made from arracache root, which is kind of like a parsnip. |
Puppies
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| There are two puppies that live at our house. Every morning, they greet us by jumping up and down at the top of the stairs. They're moving so fast, I can't get a picture of them. |
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| I'm so afraid one of them is going to fall backward off that railing because it's such a big gap. |
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| We say "hola perros" to them and then they run down the stairs because they think we're going to play with them. |
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| I don't know their names yet. Mercedes told me the first day but I've forgotten. |
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| He's really hoping we'll come down there and play. |
I Think This Ad is Very Funny
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| I pass this sign every day and every day it makes me laugh. Basically, it says, "there are many ways to go to the bathroom and you know them all" and then it goes one step further and shows photos of people going to the bathroom in different ways. I don't think we have signs like this in the United States. I think we're a little more conservative. |
Breakfast
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| An omelet with ham, onions, and peppers. Lots of onions and peppers. And a cute little sandwich on white bread. I think it had butter, cream cheese, and jam; an odd combination but I do like that Mercedes cut the crusts off the bread. |
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| I had to work REALLY hard to separate the onions and peppers from the onions. And I didn't even get them all. |
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| Sliced mango and banana. |
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| Mamones. Remember the spiky red mamones in an earlier post? These are a different version. |
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| This is what a mamon looks like when you first take a piece of the peel off. |
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| The fruit has a pretty big seed in it, so there really isn't much fruit in each one. They are about the size of a jaw breaker. Do you like the wall I built with my fork to keep the yucky onions and peppers away from the rest of my food? |
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Blood Pressure Scam
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| During lunch, a lady came to our table and offered to take our blood pressure. There are a lot of medical students at the University of Costa Rica walking around in scrubs so my first thought was that she was a student practicing her blood pressure taking skills. |
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| It turns out she just wanted a donation of money (we gave her 300 colones, which is less than one U.S. dollar). At least my blood pressure was good. |
Lunch
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| Today we ate lunch at a cute little restaurant a few blocks from the school called El Candil. |
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| Capachino fria and te frio. They were like Frappuchinos and one was made with espresso while the other was made with tea. |
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| My chicken sandwich. |
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| The filling of my sandwich. |
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| The inside of Barb's sandwich. We think our sandwiches had the exact same filling. |
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| This is called a prensada, which basically means a sandwich on a tortilla instead of bread. |
A Protest March
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| Today we saw a protest march down the main street between San Jose and San Pedro. There were hundreds of people marching. |
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| We asked around and found out it was junior high and high school teachers protesting wages and classroom conditions. It was very peaceful and the police had shut down the road for them. |
Ladder Safety
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| This doesn't look very safe to me but I've seen it lots of times while walking around Costa Rica. |
New Money
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| Costa Rica is introducing new paper money that is fashioned to look more like Euros. It is not as long as the old money. |
Coca-Cola in Glass Bottles
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| Here they serve Coca-Cola in glass bottles, which is very cool and retro. |
Mealtime at Punta Leona
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| We ate all of our meals at Punta Leona in an outdoor restaurant in the middle of the rain forest. |
The Spa at Punta Leona
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| I decided to get a massage at the spa at Punta Leona because walking around Costa Rica with a backpack full of books gets to you after awhile. It was soooooooooo nice. |
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| I liked the vessels they used for pedicures, they looked like they were handmade in Costa Rica. |
The Beach on Sunday - A Much Different Story
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| On Sunday, we tried to go back out to the beach to look at the tide pools, but the tide was much higher and we couldn't get to the rocks. |
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| That little piece of triangular sky in the top right corner is where we had climbed over the hill to the other beach the day before and there was no way we were getting over there with the tide that high. |
Swimming Pools at Punta Leona
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| I like how this pool is shaped like an arrow. |
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| On Sunday, I sat by this pool for a few hours and read a book. |
