Day Two in Costa Rica was far more productive than Day One, that's for sure. After breakfast, I left my cushy hotel (cushy being a relative term... here I am using Costa Rican standards) and decided to go check out San Jose on foot to really get a feel for it, thinking that maybe I would be more impressed with it if not just seeing it from inside my car. Yeah, turns out it's just as unimpressive while walking. I have to say, I have been to a lot of cities in a lot of countries and I am pretty sure this is the one I have liked the least. It's hard to pinpoint but the bottom line is that it's just so remarkably unremarkable. In addition to being dirty and crowded (neither of which would bother me if it was an otherwise cool city), there is just nothing to do. That being said, everyone I talked to was extremely kind, friendly and helpful.

Since my super cool Panama plan was quashed, I decided maybe I would just find another hotel in San Jose while waiting for Niki to get here Wednesday and take some day trips. I had decided that if I was going to really experience the country, I had to get out of the nice place I was staying and go to a 'real' Costa Rican hotel... no chain names, no coffee makers in the room, no American style breakfast, no hotel staff that all speaks English. I think when I arrived yesterday I was just SO tired, I was unable to search long and took the first place that looked familiar and clean. So this morning I found a place that looked reasonable and quaint (read cheap and small). It took me nearly 45 minutes to fight the San Jose traffic to move the approximately half mile to the new hotel. By the time I FINALLY got there, I was so annoyed that when I pulled up, instead of feeling immense relief at having finally found it, I instead thought to myself 'I cannot stay in this city one more minute'. So I got back in my car, opened the guidebook and picked a town by the beach to head to.

What should have taken about 2 1/2 hours took over 4. And that was WITH a GPS. If I hadn't had one, no doubt, I would still be circling the block in San Jose. For those of you familiar with my navigational skills, you will understand why this trip could NOT have taken place without a GPS. You will also not be surprised to know that I STILL got lost with it... several times. But, in my defense, I don't think it was all my fault! At one point, as I was sitting at a 'T' intersection where I could only turn right or left, it was telling me to continue to go straight for 2 more kilometers. We compromised: I turned left, it recalculated, and I eventually ended up where I was headed. Of course, not without 45 minutes sitting in city traffic, an hour long traffic jam in another area, nauseau inducing winding roads through mountains and a life threatening bridge to cross near the end (no joke, if I hadn't seen the other cars crossing it with my own eyes, I would have NEVER even dreamed of trying to take a car over it. Just think tinny, flapping metal slats covering the holes in the bridge). But about an hour before arriving, just when I was getting cranky and tired of being in the car (oh, the car is a whole other post all its own), I saw the ocean. The beautiful, expansive ocean, as far out as I could see. At that point, I turned off the AC and rolled down the windows, turned off the English music station and cranked the Spanish tunes. And for the first time instead of just counting down the minutes til reaching my destination, I really started enjoying the scenery, the sounds and the smells of it all, the people I was passing along the way... and then I realized as I was driving that I was smiling. Just smiling.

So now I'm in Quepos, a quaint little town along the southern coast. Tomorrow I am going to what is supposedly a fabulous beach set in the middle of a reserve. Tonight I had dinner at a restaurant that overlooked the ocean. Aaaaah. The server was a cute young guy who was very eager to practice his extremely limited English. So much so that he got in trouble a couple of times for lingering too long at my table. This is the kind of town I like. Not the big city where everyone speaks English and you can live just like in the US if you go to the right places and spend enough money, but where my Spanish is NEEDED to get by, where the hotel offers free internet but it doesn't work, you share a cracked marble hotel balcony with two other hotel rooms, where they serve you rice and beans for breakfast and where practically the whole town comes out to sit on the shore and watch the sun go down over the ocean. Yep, I think I'm getting closer to discovering the real Costa Rica....