La Feria

The Hines arrived at our place around 11:30am. They needed to swap their rental car in town at 12:30, and they hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day, so I made them scrambled eggs and toast.

We followed them into town, parked near the church, and waited while they traded the car (their first one leaked on the driver's side when it rained). After they were done, we went to a tourist office and got some brochures, and chatted with the guy working there. (Note: I've been in Costa Rica for one week, and it's starting to affect my English spelling. I typed turist in the previous sentence, consciously leaving off the a, and was baffled by why it was still showing as misspelled. Oh yeah, it has an o.)

Look at them turistas tourists

We checked out the church, which would have been maybe a 5-minute ordeal, but the security guard wanted to show us around. So he showed us the bell towers, we went on the roof of the vestibule for a picture with the mural of San Isidro de General, he showed us the pre-Columbian spheres (the church has two of them.) He showed us the mausoleum of the priests who are interred at the church. We got the works. It was unexpected, but cool.

This Church has got Balls

The tourist guy mentioned that there's a big farmer's market just a few blocks from the church, so we drove to that, and it became the event of the day. We perused the hundreds of stalls of the vendors for a few hours. I bought pineapple (2 for 1000), tomatoes (2.5 kilos for 1000), a bag of sweet peppers (300), half a giant guanabana (3000), 5 ready-to-eat platanos (1000), 2 massive heads of green leaf lettuce (400!), a glass of squeezed-right-in-front-of-us orange juice (500), and 30 eggs (2000, but with the change she gave back, she only charged me 1000). That's a lot of produce, for a grand total of a little over 8000 colones ($13). And almost half of that was the guanabana! I don't even think I could have gotten those tomatoes for $13 in the States. Let's work that out: 2.5 kilos is 5.5 pounds. If tomatoes are on sale at Publix, you can maybe get $1.50 per pound...which would be $8.25. Okay, so not quite $13. But bonus: these are red on the inside.

Alex bought mamonchinos. Cristina bought mangosteen and a pipa (coconut chopped open and straw inserted for drinking the water). Bella bought churros. Sofia and Anna bought some tiny bottles of local fruit wines to give as souvenirs.

La Feria has a soda food court with four little sodas. Price of a casado was 2000. Sold! We ate our meal on a little veranda that overlooked the feria.

After our meal, Cristina and Bella rode with the Hines to the grocery store, and we went back to the house. When they returned from the store, I made a light supper of green salad and chicken salad. We played a round of Scrawl and had ice cream for dessert. We also made our plans for the next three days: thermal waters near Chirripo tomorrow, canopy tour (zip lining) on Saturday, beach on Sunday. The Hines head back to San Jose on Monday, and we head south to the beach on Wednesday.