We didn't actually intend to go to Costa Rica. For the month of September, between DB's and Perrin's weddings, we thought we'd go to Mexico with frequent flier miles. We wanted to go to the Yucatan or Oaxaca. But our tickets would only take us to Mexico City. From there we could have taken a long bus ride to somewhere else but a long bus ride didn't sound appealing. Then Eric called United Airlines to see where else our frequent flier miles could take us. United gave us a list of six Latin American countries. We chose Costa Rica because we've heard it's beautiful and relatively flat. Also it's a fairly small country so we might actually get to see a bunch of it in the three weeks between weddings.

I've always heard that Latin Americans like to party hard well into the morning. So I wasn't too shocked when the plane served us dinner at midnite, and then started a film at 1 a.m. Eric slept well. I watched the idiotic film (Liar Liar). By the time we landed in Costa Rica at around 7 a.m., I'd only gotten an hour of sleep.

The airport was only a little odd. Eric saw only six gates. Thankfully, the luggage carts were free. Many of them had signs (in Spanish): Costa Rica, garden of peace and democracy.

We got through immigration without having to say much and then we got to customs. The customs workers asked every passenger to open every bag. So we had to take apart our panniers and open our bicycle boxes. I kept saying bicycletas, bicycletas. The guy chattered back to me. I didn't understand much but to be polite I nodded. Which I suppose is not smart. At the end he handed us customs slips valuing our bicycles at $500 each.

Eric spent three hours assembling our bicycles in a little-travelled corner of the airport, while I changed money and went to an English-speaking tourist office to line up a hotel in Aljuela. Aljuela is a town of 40,000 about 3k from the airport, compared to San Jose, which is huge and about 17k away. After our whirl from Juneau to Seattle to SF to LA, all Eric and I wanted to do was hunker down in a cheap hotel for a few days.

We ended up getting one called Hotel Villareal. The nice guy at the tourist office drew us a map. He didn't put on any street names or addresses because ... there aren't any (as explained in the intro).

The ride to Aljuela was easy and encouraging: several people honked and waved to cheer us on, like we were royalty.

Unfortunately, we quickly got lost once we arrived, mostly because of the lack of street names. We asked for directions from a guy who did speak some English, and he brought us to our hotel. He's a travel agent. He went in, shook hands with the owner Carlos, introduced us, and gave us his phone number. This was our first experience with a tico who was ready to adopt us on site.

Hotel Villareal is $20, or 5,000 colones a nite. It has just a few rooms, which are just a little bigger than the beds. The beds are foam mattresses. We went into our room and crashed for five hours.

Around 5 p.m. we got up and wandered into the streets in search of food. The streets are narrow and mostly one-way. The sidewalks are pretty narrow too. Once you get a block or two from the very center of town, the gutters are real bicycle eaters--they are more than a foot deep, and interrupted every several feet by iron grates that are supposed to help you cross from the sidewalk to the street.

By chance, we found the best food place in town: the Mercado Central, which is full of "sodas" or very cheap food stands, that serve empanadas and tortas and tacos and all that. We picked one, and I stared at the menu for awhile before some Spanish came out. After much studying of the menu, and quizzing the waitress, I ordered some soup and something that turned out to be a sweet corn gruel. Then I looked at Eric. To make things easy he said I should get him the same thing.

The waitress was very sweet. Her name is Cecilia, and she talked with us a little bit even though I couldn't understand a lot of what she was saying. She asked if we liked the food, and later she sat down to eat with us. Then she said she had a 21-year-old daughter who speaks English, and we should meet her. I thought her daughter was at the market. But it turns out Cecilia wanted us to come home with her.

So when the market closed at 6 p.m., we waited for Cecilia and her friend to clean up the soda, and then we walked with her. On the way out she paused before a large statue of the Virgin Mary and blessed herself. She said that Mary was the patron saint of the mercado. We walked with her and her friend. We had no idea where we were going but we felt safe. After a few blocks, Cecilia motioned for us to get into a cab. So all four of us did.

The cab took us about 2k to Cecilia's house. The fare was about 235 colones, or about $1. We got out with her and her friend continued on to a different place.

Like many of the houses we saw, Cecilias had a huge black iron gate that made it look a little like a jail. We went inside, past a very nice sitting room. Instead of bringing us there, Cecilia brought us into her small bedroom, which had a single bed, a bunch of toys, a television and a computer.

I've always thought how it's a little odd that Americans have these great, ultra clean, ultra-nice living rooms that they never use. Instead, they bring guests to the more comfortable family room, which usually has a TV. Well I guess it's not just Americans who do that. Cecilia's house was a little like that too.

Cecilia had us sit down on her bed, and introduced us to her three-year-old girl Pamy. She pointed out portraits on the wall of her, her husband who passed away (she had a very sad face when she said this), their three daughters and their son.

Then she brought in Ana, her English speaking daughter. I started talking to her in English, but Ana could not speak much, or was too shy to try. So, it was better for me. We talked in Spanish, and every once in awhile, when we reached an impasse (me having to say no comprendo two times in a row), Ana would dust off a few English words to help me through the crisis.

A little knowledge is a bad thing. So for all I know, I could have misunderstood her badly in some way. But I think I understood most of what she was saying. She is about to graduate from universidad with a degree in chemistry. Then she'll have two months off until she starts graduate school in February. During her break, she'll work for Kodak, as she has in past school breaks. I asked her why she didn't want to be a working chemist, and she said: How do you say? My dream (and here she crossed her hands over her heart) is to be professora de la chimica.

She says she has some very close childhood friends who are now living in Maryland, and she misses them. She called them her brother and sister, though they aren't related. She said she would never move out of the country because she loves her little sister Pamy.

The whole time we were talking Cecilia was in the kitchen. Later she came out and invited us into that room for some coffee and bread. We had a great time sitting around and talking. Eventually we got Ana to call us a taxi so we could go back to the hotel.

There we slept the sleep of the dead.

Next: we nearly rob a bank.

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