Pura vida!

"Oh, the girl will take care of it in the morning."
That was the reply when Gina offered to help clean up after dinner earlier this week at her cousin's house in Ciudad Colon.
You see, Gina's cousin is a finacial consultant, having formerly been the first female head of a bank in Costa Rica. Her husband is a civil engineer. Their property includes two houses (one for her in-laws), a pool, a yard as big as my parents' house that has papaya and coconut trees and the office building for her consulting firm (that she runs with her father-in-law).
Also included in the house is a groundskeeper/caretaker of the property and household help, including, for lack of a better term, a maid. She makes the beds, cleans the house, does the dishes, puts out the food (she readily admits she's not a good cook, so we've been doing our share of cooking), does the laundry ... pretty much everything.
It's cool ... and a bit overwhelming at the same time. I mean, wow. How many of us, outside of staying at a hotel, have ever had the opportunity to have a maid?
I think that both of us are trying our best not to rely on her because, really, we're used to doing things ourselves. But there are just things that happen when we step away. And it's sorta nice.
Oh, and as I'm writing this, their private dance instructor just showed up. Both her cousin and husband aren't home yet, so Gina and I are looking at each other: dance instructor? Really!?!?
Oh well, I suppose we could move down here and live this sort of life.
But why would I want to give up on the glamour and prestige of a career in journalism?

Being stuck without transportation while on vacation sucks. Thanks to years of abuse, we don't have the room to secure a rental, so we stayed at the house all day Wednesday.
Deciding we couldn't just waste away the vacation in a house (no matter how big and spacious and beautiful), we hopped the bus to San Jose.
For 310 colones apiece (that's roughly 70 cents, depending on the exchange rate you get at the bank), we were taken the 20 kilometers - hooray for the metric system - from Ciudad Colon into the capital San Jose.
San Jose is a big, crowded, dirty city. We decided to take in a little bit of culture, so we went to the national museum and saw the history of the country. Unfortunately for us, two of the exhibits were closed. One was the butterfly garden, which was one of the things we had hoped to see in town. Oh well.
But what we did see was interesting. They had part of one of the forts that guarded the town in the early days, before they decommissioned the army. And a complete history of the country, and how its diversity shaped the region.
We then walked down to a busy pedestrian mall. Gina describes it as "Santa Monica, without the ocean." You've got shopping centers with food courts. Lots of little shops, like those you'd see along the streets of New York. Shops selling everything from clothes to jewelry to souveniers. All old, a bit dirty but kinda quaint.
And crowded. A whole mass of people trying to share the same space while people trying to sell pirated DVD's set up shop on the ground (Ice Age 3 and Up were two of the titles I saw).
Everyone in the shops we went to were very nice. And the taxi drivers were knowledgeable, helpful AND nice.
We warned to watch our things, so we didn't take any pictures of the area.
So, that was the day.
One more full day, then a full day of travel home.
More thoughts then.