San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, isn’t generally considered a tourist destination. However, hubby really wanted to tour the city since we were going to be there anyway. Most travelers will just make a connection to their destination town, but we decided to spend the night and do a half-day city tour the next morning. We started out by heading out of the city and this giant new stadium was the first curiosity that we encountered. If you believed our tour guide, and I wasn’t too sure about him, the Chinese government paid to have this built as a friendly gift to Costa Rica and in an attempt to curry favor in the U.N.
Along the same road as the park, was this beautiful house that Pope John Paul II stayed in during his visit to Central America.
We drove up into the surrounding hills and had a neat look down on the three connected cities siting below us in the valley.
The retaining wall above the field had a very large and very cool mural that told the history of the area and how they had used Ox extensively in their farming and daily lives.
Our guide informed us that the church is always at the center of town & since there are rarely street signs, most directions are given relative to the church.
Just around the corner, we saw several traditional old homes that still have the cooking pit outside.
Our next stop was this really random art gallery that had numerous paintings and tons of over-priced jewelry. It was a required stop on the tour, but we both felt it was rather rude to force us to pretend to shop on a tour that we had paid to take & there was a second required stop at a souvenir shop downtown too.
GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY:
30 days of Lists is coming again in September & I am going to actually follow along on the real schedule this time. If you want to be part of a community creative writing project, check it out and register early.
