San Jose
After my stary in Heredia, I moved to San Jose and began to spend my time more like a tourist. Of course, I tried to not become a tourist. My goal in traveling is to learn as much about the culture of a place as possible. But, I'm still an outsider paying for the privilege of visiting other people in their homes.
San Jose
May 24, 2003
I´m planning to head north tomorrow to see some of the humdrum natural wonders of Costa Rica. You´ll know more when I know more. But I need to give everyone an update on San Jose. After all I´ve been here a day and a half, so I have to write this down before I learn something new.
Sign in the window of a Denny´s in San Jose (this is not a translation by me): ¨Kids eat free. Wednesday to Friday, 4 to 9 p.m.¨
Sara (my travel partner) arrived yesterday. Her flying weather was fine, but by the time she walked out of the airport she was greeted by me and by a torrential (one could even say tropical) downpour. As we rode in the car I´d hired we crossed temporary streams crossing the road repeatedly.
There was another downpour like that today in SJ, but this one continued at a lower level until now, early evening. But this morning as we walked around the city we made a note that at 8 a.m. it was in the 80s.
We´ve seen a few of the sights in central San Jose, including the Parque Nacional with its monument to the defeat of filibuster William Walker in 1856. There do not seem to be any leftover hard feelings. I can´t say that I´ve seen much anti-American (US) sentiment. It is common here to here US music from the 80s. There is quite a bit of graffiti against Bush and the war in Iraq. But that just means CR is going along with he rest of the world.
In Plaza España, a statue of a conquistador stands staring out at the world outside the park. Someone had written across the breastplate, ¨asesino.¨
San Jose has some features that identify it as a Spanish city. The pervasive use of Spanish is, of course, a vital clue (though I´m sure Rene´Descartes would have dismissed that and have looked for more certain evidence). Men almost never wear shorts and women don´t either (though in Heredia they certainly did). There are many mestizo people on the pedestrian walk through the central city, though there is quite a wide range of skin tone. The comparison to Madrid is hard to avoid. Some of these people could be walking down a street in Madrid, though usually they are not quite as well dressed as a Madrileño.
But walk a few blocks from the pedestrian walkway and you are in a third world country. We had to visit the bus stop for tomorrow´s trip, so we made out way through the Mercado Central. This is not as raw and wild and the Mercado in Cusco, but you could still find every kind of product here, with people pressing through narrow passsages between booths. This is part of the red light district that Gabriel, a US native living in SJ warned me of. We made sure not to carry cameras and other neon-like adveritsements of our tourist status and I never felt at all threatened. The road from the Mercado to the bus stop was through a very run down area, abandoned storefronts and small business hanging on to what little custom seemed to exist.
Sign in a bar in Heredia that had five posters of Che Guevara (my translation): ¨Twenty years from now you will repent more of what you did not do than what you did.¨
Our last night here we go to a jazz concert at Teatro National. The performances were very good, but I have to admit it felt like everyone was taking it far too seriously. In addition to the music, there were a couple of moments when people came on stage to share poetic statements about the beauty and meaning of jazz. Too much for us. We left after one encore.
