Costa Rica Day 3

My legs are tired!  I pretty much spent the entire day walking.  Definitely saw a good chunk of San Jose today.

Started the day off with a nice breakfast that is included in my hotel stay.  The staple rice & beans plus some toast, eggs and coffee.  I met another single traveler, Eva, at breakfast who is on the same tour and we spent the morning walking around checking out the city (later in the dat we find out that will be roomies for the trip).  Very nice girl which is a bonus.

We went looking for a market that was supposed to be fairly close to our hotel but ended up finding a huge market in the middle of town that had everything you could think of.  Our interesting discovery in the market was a pet store that had puppies and right underneath their cage were ducks, chickens and pigeons.  I'm surprised the puppies didn't go bananas trying to get at the various birds below them.    I'm also not sure why anyone would buy a pigeon.  I'm sure if someone wanted one badly enough they can catch one of the hundreds around the city.  Another funny thing that we saw today was a store that sold motorcycles and then right beside them were washing machines.  On the other side was a foosball table.  Interesting combination of items.

We met the rest of our tour group at the hotel around 1 pm to discuss the upcoming tour and what to expect.  Sounds like it's going to be a great trip!  Once our briefing was done, we went on a walking tour of the city with our guide.  So far I'm really impressed with our guide.  Very informative and super nice!  He took us around to see some really beautiful buildings that I hadn't seen yet in my walk around the city so that was good.  At one point of the tour he told us "don't go past here.  If you go past here you're in the red light district."  Eva and I looked at each other and laughed 'cause we did some walking around in that area this morning and didn't even realize!  Oops!  We were completely fine and had no problems but it was kinda funny finding that out after the fact.

I had a nap when we got back to the hotel...I was totally tired from walking all day.  We had a couple hours to kill before we all headed out for dinner and I decided that napping was key in order for me to make it through dinner.

Dinner was at a Costa Rican restaurant which was all decked out with various Costa Rican "things" like lampshades that were originally coffee harvesting baskets and hanging tin cups, bananas and onions.  Very eclectic decor!  The food was good and it was nice that we all had dinner as a group.

Tomorrow we make out way to La Fortuna, which is by the Arenal Volcano.  I'm crossing my fingers that we see some eruptions!  I've been told that there hasn't been much volcanic activity over the past couple of months so I'm not going with high expectations to see much.  No matter what, the scenery will be beautiful and a new and different experience.

KK

If my passport could talk...
                                         "See you later San Jose...hello La Fortuna!"