Thursday, November 4, 2010

Pasajes de Costa Rica, viaje 2, día 1

This is part of 8 posts where I will, with minor edits and omissions, put my journal from days in Costa Rica online. There is no real grammar structure, but hopefully it makes sense...
10/23/2010 Saturday
This trip caught me off guard. Two weeks ago I had no reservations. Ideas but no plans set. I thought about winging the whole thing but now am happy I have the plans I do. I'm not sure what I'm expecting from the trip, but I'm excited. On the flight from DIA to ATL I sat next to the lady who read and crunched sunflower seeds all flight... no sleep. From ATL to SJO I read 1/3 of a biography about a ski bum from Wolf Creek. It was a bit confusing flying through a tropical storm reading about neck-deep powder. I think this trip signifies the end of fall for me. A little bit of summer before winter in November. My Spanish is definitely better. On the SJO flight I talked to a Tico in Spanish. He was returning from Boston... loaded up on electronics. Apparently it's much cheaper to buy that stuff in the US. Good chat with the taxi driver too. I'm not en route to Manuel Antonio. I'm really pumped for the park tomorrow. I got a text that OSU beat Purdue (49-0, exactly as I like to see) so now the phone is off.

8pm. Just wrapped up a funny dinner that has me wishing I had a whole week booked at Vela Bar. My room is awesome. A fridge, A/C, fan, attached bathroom, tons of windows. I booked a guide for tomorrow and discovered with WiFi during dinner... not to mention experienced probably the hardest sustained rainfall of my life. Horrific waves of clouds are sweeping in off the Pacific. We're in a lull right now. But seriously, on the drive in, it was raining so hard that the windshield wipers on full blast weren't really helping visibility. Streams gushed across the road. Every trough/lane of the Spanish tile roof here seems as if somebody has turned a faucet on at the top of it... curtains of rain. It's a refreshing change from Boulder. And speaking of small worlds, on the bus ride in, one group was from Austin and the other were from San Diego with ties to Active and RegOnline.
Once I was established, I ate. The theme of dinner became, "well, I've never had that before..." Rainy season is 2 for 1 happy hour, so I got 2 blackberry coladas (I thought it would just be half price but actually was given 2). The sailfish casado was excellent. My waitor was extremely nice; asked me where I'd been already, where I was going, commented on my Spanish and asked how I had learned, etc. The room and staff here are great. I hope tomorrow is too. This trip went from backburner to "pick up right where we left off last Halloween" in about 6 hours.

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