By Saturday we were starting to settle into life in Costa Rica. I woke up at 7, but the rest of the house slept till 9 or 10. We had a big leisurely breakfast. Our goals today were to do some grocery shopping and visit the Mercado Central, a big bustling indoor stall market with lots of traditional items and foods for sale.
As much as it pains me to admit it, we shopped at Wal-Mart. It's kinda pointless to fight the Evil Empire here, because they own most of the grocery chains. There's a Wal-Mart a couple of miles from the Airbnb, so we went for convenience. A few of the things we were after, in addition to groceries for cooking at the Airbnb, were some kind of collapsible cooler or freezer bag for taking our refrigerated things from Airbnb to Airbnb, and a Kolbi SIM card. We brought an old phone from home that we plan to use for navigating with Waze if our T-Mobile phones lose their signal on the road.
A few observations about prices for things: very surprised at how expensive avocados were (about 4000 colones per kilo, that's about $3/lb), pleasantly surprised at how cheap green leaf lettuce was (400 colones per head, about 67 cents) and amazed at how cheap beets were (4 for 1000 colones, or $1.67...that's 42 cents per beet, and they were big!).
Back at the house (I'm going to call it the house, because I'm tired of typing Airbnb) we put groceries away and then headed out to the Mercado Central. Downtown San Jose seemed pretty much the same. Maybe more crowded with pedestrians than I remember. We almost bought a Kolbi card from a guy on the street (Wal-Mart didn't have them) but decided against it. The Market was it's usual big self, filled with varying smells of fresh (but stinky) fish, fresh flowers, leather products, and the aromas of little eating places all throughout. Since this is the beginning of our trip, we didn't buy anything, so we're not carting the stuff around for 6 weeks. But we checked out the prices of things that we're interested in buying.
We walked by the Gold Museum but it had just closed at 5pm. I got a cup of coffee from a little coffee stand, and got everyone a churro, since we hadn't eaten lunch.
We picked up the car from the parking garage, which closed at 6:30, and headed back home. On the way, we passed a Kolbi store, so we stopped there and Cristina and Ramon (and Alex) went in to see about a card while the rest of us stayed in the car.
Finally home by 7 or so, we cooked a big dinner of balsamic chicken, rice, beans, and beets. Some watched one of the Fast and Furious movies on TV. I was tired and grumpy after the stress of the past 3 days (getting into the routine, driving in San Jose traffic, worrying about the financials of six weeks in a noticeably more expensive Costa Rica, etc.) so I went to bed after dinner.
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