San José

Today was my first adventure out of Heredia!  Five of the girls from my class and I decided to take a day trip to the capital of Costa Rica, San José!  Since we arrived here, we haven’t heard many positive things about the city.  We’ve been told that it was dirty, full of illegal Nicaraguans, and that people will snatch your camera out of your hands.  So why would we decide to go to such a horrible city?  Well…There are several things in San José that we felt like we shouldn’t leave Costa Rica without seeing…like the Teatro Nacional, el Parque Nacional, and el Museo Nacional.  Turns out, the city was a lot of fun and all the things worth seeing were very close to one another.   Our experience was actually the contrary of what everybody had been telling us about the city.  Except for being stared at everywhere we went for being Americans, (San Jose isn’t really a tourist destination) everything went smoothly.

The view from my window this morning

My day began by waking up and seeing the beautiful mountains outside my window.  I see them everyday, but never have they been as clear as they were today.  Anyway, I met the other girls at 8 at the Universidad where we started trying to find a bus to take us to San Jose.  We knew the general direction of where we could catch the bus, but it took wandering around for a bit and asking a few people in order to find it. 

When we arrived in San Jose, the bus let us off at a beautiful church called La Iglesia de la Merced.  We took pictures and then took out our maps to figure out if we were close to where we wanted to be. It took us quite a long time to get anywhere, because we kept getting distracted by parks, buildings, or other fun things to see.  Anyway, we found the Museo Nacional and continued on looking for el Teatro Nacional. (The Nacional Theater) We spent about 2 hours wandering around San Jose thinking all the time that we were somehow just missing the Teatro and overlooking it.  We had asked several different people, and each had given us different directions.  We decided to take a break for lunch, after which we ran into another couple people from our program!  We asked her if she knew where the Theater is, and we felt very stupid when we were standing about 300 yards from it at the time.  The theater is actually on the back of the Museo Nacional, but this was definitely not clear on the maps. Haha. 

While wandering around, however, we stumbled upon the train station…My host mother had mentioned that we should take the train, but we didn’t know enough about it to even try it.  Since we found the station, we decided to try it!  It was a few colones cheaper than the bus, and a much more pleasant experience.  

I don’t really have any plans for the rest of the weekend, but I my try to find somebody to go to el Paseo de los Flores (The mall in Heredia) with me to just look around. 

BUT, I don’t have to wake up at 6:30 tomorrow, which I am ecstatic about! 

I know this entry was kind of all over the place, but I’m about to fall asleep as I type this. Hasta Mañana!

I posted my pictures from San Jose on Facebook, but here are just a few of my favorites!