The Costa Rica Files, Version 1.0

The above photograph was taken in central Florida on the drive to Orlando last night. It occured to me today that I have become entirely too dependent on American style signs and signals to tell me what to do. I had a hard time adjusting to the traffic flow with the rental car. Here, the driving regulations seem to be: point your car in the general direction of your destination, try not to hit another car or pedestrian. With the second portion being more of a rule of thumb than an actual regulation.

And crossing the street? Christena, Taylor, and I decided to roam around San Jose today and see some of the sights. Sadly, we watched helplessly as the local people darted in and out of traffic crossing the street while we, without crosswalks or the little "walking man" symbol, were relegated to looking like idiots... Tomorrow we head for the countryside/jungle which should be more our pace.

The picture above? Do we really need to be reminded to look out for poisonous snakes? I suppose so, but here that would be like a sign reminding people to breathe... Just as they've learned to drive, walk in traffic, &c. sans benefit of instruction...
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Arriving in Costa Rica, it was interesting to learn that their version of Spanish is slightly different than what you might learn in a text book. For example, the Costa Rican' Spanish word for "Droid phone with Verizon service" is "Clock".

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As I type this, my softball team is playing for the city championship. Without their best player of course. I've been texting with the guys a little bit, trying to keep up. Last I heard we were down by 6 runs. I hope they pull it out if for no other reason than Taylor's coach-pitch team already won the city championship in the 7-8 year old division, and I don't want to hear his crap if we don't follow suit.

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Sorry ladies, it seems that I have been on the wrong side of the camera for most of the day. We'll try to correct that tommorrow. In the meantime, here are some photos of San Jose:


San Jose seems to sit in a valley with mountains all around. The temperature was quite comfortable today. Not at all what I expected or experienced on my previous trips to the tropics. I suppose it might be a function of the elevation. Anyways, you can see a little of the city/mountains in the background.

No one prepared Taylor for the pronounciation of the letter "J" in Spanish, and for that matter, we never told him the names of the cities we would be visiting. So his 1st exposure to San Jose was via reading it, and as you can imagine, he rendered it with a hard J. Kinda like San Joecee.


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An update from the team. We were in the winner's bracket so our opponent must defeat us twice. We lost the first game 26 -21 and lost our real best player to a hamstring injury. Game 2 is currently underway.

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That's it. Assuming there is adequate Internet access and time, I'll add more content over the next few days. I've optimistically titled today's post 1.0, with hopes that there will be more...

I usually write these things without outside input. At times, I've written something that I thought was funny, only to find out later that no one "got it". Christena read part of this post and didn't understand the droid/clock analogy above. All I was trying to say is that there is no cell service, but it still keeps time... Of course, it will connect to wi-fi, so in addition to not being particularly funny, my joke is also not entirely true.

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Seriously, the last thing. As I experienced in Borneo last year, when you use Blogger in a non-English speaking country, spellcheck doesn't work. As of right now, the software is convinced that I've misspelled about 90% of this post. I'm hopeful that this is kind of on the high side, but I'm not sure what to do about it. So please forgive some of the misspellings and overlook the others...