Rain Day

I woke up around 6am to the pleasing sounds of heavy rain. To me, there is no better sound when you're sleeping, or just having a lie-in, or a lazy day. The sound of heavy rain that doesn't seem to be letting up, however, is not a sound that bodes well for hiking to a waterfall. As long as it kept raining, I just stayed in bed, knowing that the hike was less and less of a possibility today. And this is vacation. If we just have to lie around all day, so be it. That's not a wasted day, in my opinion.

Sure enough, it rained all morning. When the rain let up, the sky was still a solid grey or white, so by noon, it looked like it might just rain all day. Tomorrow was intended to be packing/prepping day: wash clothes, go into town and do some souvenir shopping, have dinner with our hosts. So we opted to switch today for tomorrow (except for the host dinner). Tonight, I would make pesto chicken pasta for dinner.

Kat and Cristina did some research on desserts we could make without an oven, to take to dinner on Friday. We headed to Fortuna to shop.

First, we went to a giant souvenir place. The store had Sarchi in its name, so I resisted the temptation to purchase much, since we were planning a quick trip to the actual Sarchi in a few days. Good to scout out possible items we want to bring home and compare prices.

I'd like to get something like this for salt.

Hope to find one cheaper than $22 in Sarchi

We parked in town and walked around in the rain to various stores. I bought a casado for 2000 colones. That might be the cheapest one yet! It wasn't bad, either. Bella got gelato. Alex got some chips and gummy candies.

A really happy-looking dog (I swear he was smiling) followed us around town for a while. Against the better judgment of Alex and Sofia, I fed him some pieces of chicken from my casado. He had a blue tongue.

Alex found CR soccer jerseys for $13. He bought two. Who would have thought that anything would be cheapest in Fortuna? They're probably cheaper in San Jose now that the Gold Cup is over, but he may as well get them here.

Grabbed some pastries from Mus Manni, which has become Bella's favorite place.

We did the free tour at the Chocolate Museum. It was decent. We didn't tip the guy, but we did buy something. I was impressed with the number of samples they gave during the tour.

On the way home, we stopped at Rosvil to get dessert ingredients for the host dinner on Friday and dinner stuff for tonight. The dessert Kat and Cristina settled on was a no-bake oatmeal cookie type thing. The ingredients list had several things that we would not use up before the end of our trip, and pricey at that. So I decided we'd just get them flowers and some kind of store-bought dessert. While the produce guy wrapped up the cilantro, we asked him where to buy flowers and he suggested a florist in the center of town.

The pesto chicken pasta turned out pretty good.