Review of abandoned houses for sale::If you inherit a house and sell it, can you do whatever ...
Review of abandoned houses for sale::If you inherit a house and sell it, can you do whatever ...
SAN JOSE, COSTA RICA -- San Jose is a moldering old Central American capital city set in the center of a country renowned for its jungle flora and fauna. On my short vacation, I found it a pleasantly funky, walkable town. I arrived at Juan Santamaria International Airport in the middle of the afternoon under cloudy skies. It was what local Ticos call the "rainy" season although the "dry" season is rainy, too. San Jose receives approximately 74 inches of rainfall each year, about twice that of Seattle, and other parts of the country receive three times that much.. It was umbrella weather when I arrived and in San Jose people went about their business carrying umbrellas. Founded by the Spanish in 1736, balmy San Jose lies in in a broad fertile valley at an elevation of approximately 3,300 feet. According to government statistics, its year-round median temperature is 70 degrees. Approximately the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica itself is home to more than 4 million people, many of them migrants from neighboring Nicaragua where the unemployment rate is something like 58 percent. Approximately 2 million tourists descend on Costa Rica every year. I had worn a pair of hiking boots in case of muddy weather and I had a straw hat slung back over my shoulder, for the tropical sun. I stuffed a change of clothes, a collapsible umbrella, an alarm clock, and very little else into one small bag which was my luggage for a week's visit. I am a thrifty person, and it cost me what I considered a fortune at the airport to change a few dollars into Costa Rican colons (current exchange rate: approximately 500 colons per $1 USD). To save colons, and to get some of the flavor of "real" Costa Rica, I wanted to take a local bus and avoid the $25 USD taxi fare for the 20 minute ride from the airport into San Jose. Before I left home, a check on the State Department website warned me about increasing levels of violence in Costa Rica, so the idea of taking a local bus was somewhat daunting. My Spanish is spotty and I didn't want to get lost, but I decided on the local bus when I discovered that all the San Jose busses all finish their routes in downtown San Jose where I had booked a room. Outside the airport, a packed street full of red taxis and gesturing taxi drivers were hustling business from the tourists who were blinking like so many deer in the headlights. Asking directions from an airport employee, I was finger pointed to a bus stop on the other side of the parking structure, along a main highway and away from the mad swarm of taxis and tourists. I sat down next to two polite young local girls, and a bus almost immediately arrived. "San Jose?" I timidly asked. The driver waved me in. I gave him 500 colons and I was on my way to San Jose. I was the only tourist on the bus. It was not air-conditioned, but all the windows were open and I relaxed as cool moist tropical air blew back through the hot bus. The bus passed lots of small claptrap houses, almost all topped by tin roofs already turning orange from rain and rust. Roaring streams sunk deep into thickets of jungle foliage flashed past my window, but quickly gave way to still more tin-roofed houses. The population of the province of San Jose is 1.5 million, but the city of San Jose has only about 350,000 people so most people live outside the city limits. The bus pulled off the road once or twice to pick up passengers and soon we arrived in San Jose, where it was rush hour. As the guidebooks suggested, I grabbed a taxi at the bus station (San Jose has several bus stations). I handed the driver the card on which I'd written the address in Spanish and away we went to the hostel near Kiosco de Parque Morazon. The driver turned on the maria, a digital meter which clicks away the mileage to assure an honest count on the fare, and in a few short minutes we were there. I had reserved a room in a hostel called Tranquilo Backpackers. My private room and shared bathroom and shower were $27 a night but I didn't want the $7 a night dormitory-style room. When I checked in, the desk clerk told me the streets were safe downtown until 10 p.m. or so and I went out for a walk. It was an pleasant walk from my hostel through Parque Morazon where skateboarding kids and kissing lovers and old men sat on benches. On the bustling Avenida Central, I bought a loaf of tasty especial bread with ham and cream baked into the bread from a small local bakery, plus fruit and cheese from the Mas+Menos supermarket across the street half hidden behind a bank of idling tour busses. My first night in Costa Rica I discovered the taste of a banana picked from the tree was considerably sweeter than those purchased in the states which are shipped green, and artificially ripened. In addition to dorm and private rooms, the hostel had a big room with a wide-screen TV and mattresses on the floor, several computers in the lobby for checking email, a couple of hammocks in the front yard for reading, a shared refrigerator, and an airy kitchen under a tin roof where you could cook or prepare meals for most of the day. The hostel also had a free pancake breakfast. While eating breakfast, I had a nice chats with a woman from Holland who had researched her master's thesis on eco-tourism, a guy from California on his way to Panama to try and find work on a fishing boat, schoolteachers from Switzerland and New Orleans, a refugee from the Florida real estate bust, a couple of frazzled Canadian psychologists whose backpack containing their airline tickets home had been snatched on the bus, and more. My very simple private room had one large transom window overlooking a maze of tin roofs. The weather cooled down at night just enough to require the thin blanket provided by the hostel. I loved the cool evening breeze through my window, the low rumble of tropical thunder, and the occasional patter of tropical rain on the tin roofs outside. Despite all the moisture and rain, I never saw a mosquito in San Jose. The hostel's friendly black and white spotted cat crept boldly in and out of my open window, sometimes curling up at my feet to sleep. In the morning, a blazing tropical sun woke me up every day at 6 a.m. The worst day at the hostel was the day that city water was shut off. This left hostel residents without morning coffee, and combing San Jose in search of bathrooms for much of the day. Although taxis are plentiful and cheap, San Jose is a very walkable city. I walked around quite a bit, to the zoo and parks and museums and souvenir shops and butterfly house and markets. I always felt safe although I did avoid the area northwest of downtown said to be dangerous. It rained every day, usually in the mid-afternoon, and I always took my umbrella. Costa Rica is a neutral country with no standing army but San Jose has plenty of young uniformed policemen. During the day I saw pairs of cops every few blocks, and I found them very professional and helpful with directions. All the streets in downtown San Jose are one-way and they swell with traffic during the morning and evening rush hour. San Jose's traffic lights face only two directions, toward oncoming traffic, so crossing the street involves guesswork as there are no walk signals. Costa Ricans just scamper across the street when things look clear. One thing you learn right away is that San Jose's taxi drivers and bus drivers do not stop for pedestrians. This unsettling fact became frighteningly real when a Rapido Transito bus hissed loudly around a corner when I was crossing the street and I had to scurry for the curb like a scared squirrel. Downtown San Jose's sidewalks are narrow, old and not particularly level and flat - many are more like a weird footpath of cement, rocks, and potholes. And of course, it's a third world country, you can walk around a corner and find a six-foot high mound of garbage in plastic bags stacked in the middle of the sidewalk, or loads of fill dirt or concrete rubble in unexpected places. The city of San Jose is a mix of historic old colonial buildings, many moldering parks, well-tended federal government buildings, 15-story Holiday Inns, schools, restaurants, casinos, plus miscellaneous small office and apartment buildings and houses. Many of the homes I strolled past were behind high iron fences topped with coiled razor wire, and several decaying old mansions appeared to be abandoned or for sale. San Jose is known for its clever pickpockets and friends warned me to be careful. An American friend told a story of a drunken evening with a group of guys. One of their guys was suddenly surrounded on the street by laughing, flirting Costa Rican prostitutes. His friends shouted to watch his wallet, but the "victim" eventually emerged smiling and triumphantly took his wallet out of his pocket and held it high. However, when he looked inside, his wallet was completely empty. The beautiful Costa Rican prostitutes had removed all his money, slipped the wallet back in his pocket, and happily moved on. San Jose is laid out on a confusing grid. Calles or Streets run north and south, and Avenidas or Avenues run east and west. However, the even numbered streets and avenues are on one side of the Avenida Central and Calle Central, and the odd numbers on the other side. So you walk only one block between Avenida 1 and Avenida 3, and so on. To muck things up a little more, San Jose has no street signs. A few streets have the street and avenue numbers posted on the sides of corner buildings,15 feet or so off the ground but many have no identification at all. I always carried a map to make sure I knew where I was. Running east and west through the center of town is the Avenida Central, a wide brick-lined walk street flanked by clothing and appliance stores of a type found in any medium-sized town in America, hotels, banks, restaurants, museums and tourist attractions mixed in with American fast food joints, street vendors and other Costa Rican businesses. Unique to Costa Rica are the many little sodas, or coffee shops, where I had a glass of the most delicious passion fruit juice I'd ever tasted. Pedestrians walked day and night along the crowded Avenida Central, particularly on the west end, where there are lots of street vendors. Many sell sacks of produce, bunches of bananas, and avocados from push carts or squat beside pikes of fruit on the street. Early in the morning, Avenida Central vendors on folding chairs hawked lottery tickets, crying out loudly, and at night other types of vendors spread out blankets full of things like DVDs and T-shirts on the brick street and a few terribly poor and disabled Costa Rica men and women sat on the ground, arms upstretched, begging with tin cups. On the narrow sidewalks, walking vendors opened their coats to offer me Valium or boxes of Cuban cigars. Drugged-out American expats wandered the streets. Amateur jugglers and clowns bravely stopped traffic at intersections to try to amuse drivers for a few colons. Inside most shops, merchants would happily take either credit cards, dollars or colons, but the street vendors in San Jose weren't the bargaining type at all. One vendor flatly refused to sell me a handful of leche nuts, telling me gruffly he would only sell one full sack for 1,500 colons. In a little souvenie shop, a saleslady haughtily turned down my offer of $3 for a $4 slingshot (I had only $3 in my wallet). After a couple more encounters like this, I realized that Costa Rican vendors, unlike vendors in some Latin American countries, do not like to bargain at all. The exception to this was in a mercado called La Casona along Calle Central near Avenida 1, where I felt immediately at home. It was something like a giant yard sale. Vendors in what appeared to be a building full of small shops waved me over and immediately offered discounts for cash. Salesladies passed me like a hot potato through a dreamy warren of charming little shops offering among other things, Costa Rican wooden jewelry, colorful boxes, carved animals, oxcarts, framed exotic butterflies, replicas of the pre-Colombian jewelry and other interesting items. I had taken a straw hat to Costa Rica to ward off the tropical sun, but as I walked around San Jose, my straw hat slung over my back, cowboy style, I was puzzled that almost no one else in this tropical country wore or even carried a hat of any kind. The weather was often overcast, and I didn't see much of the tropical sun. Did the somewhat formal Ticos consider hats not necessary? Then I toured one of the Costa Rica's famous volcanoes and experienced a sudden gusting wind that twisted the string of my hat around my neck, nearly strangling me. Hats, I learned, are a bad idea in rainy countries with lots of wind. Costa Rica is the world's No. 2 coffee producer, after Colombia. Although I am particular, everywhere I went in San Jose, I was served what I would consider great coffee. The coffee was always A-plus, even at the hostel, but fresh cream was never available, even milk was rare. Usually it was powdered cream and packets of cane sugar. The proper Costa Rican method of making coffee, which I enjoyed on visit to a coffee plantation, is to pour hot water through a small cloth sack which is about the size of a hummingbird nest, full of ground coffee, an interesting variation on the standard drip method that works well. For a third world country, Costa Rica nearly has nearly first world prices. American-style hotels and meals are not really much cheaper than they are back in the U.S. and imported items like cars which are not made in Costa Rica are said to be even more expensive than cars purchased in the states. Getting local currency to spend is difficult and expensive, and some businesses discourage credit cards. My hostel, for instance, would accept only cash. Visiting a Costa Rican bank is like visiting a prison. Scowling uniformed bank security guards pat you down and scan you with metal-detecting wands. Once inside, you take a number from a machine and sit down on plastic chairs with a group of people to wait for your number to come up on a board, which directs you to a bank teller. And of course, there is always a fee to change money. I found two ATM machines in downtown San Jose -- one was completely out of both dollars and colons every time I tried to use it, and the other charged me 875 colons or almost $2 to give me $20 in Costa Rican currency. In San Jose, I saw two Costa Rican art shows, one at the lovely Museo de los Ninos or Children's Museum, an old yellow building on top of a hill near central San Jose, and one at the Plaza de la Cultura, where the museums are underground. I booked a couple of moderately interesting one-day tours, and did some other tourist things. My most enjoyable moments was in the humble Parque Bolivar Zoo, a smallish zoo near the hostel. The funky little zoo is situated on the bank of a tropical river and the winding sidewalks lined with rain forest plants. As a warm rain began falling, most of the visitors scurried for cover. Almost alone under my umbrella, I looked at monkeys, exotic birds and tropical snakes in the gently falling tropical rain. As I stood before the parrot cage, enjoying the rain, I realized a large parrot was talking to me in Spanish. "Hola! Hola!" the parrot cried, tilting its head. "Como esta?" San Jose wasn't exactly the tropical paradise that I expected, but I liked it enough to go back. |
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