Alajuela

We spent the day orienting ourselves to lovely Costa Rica and figuring out an itinerary for our time here. It´s great to be back and fun to share Alajuela with Mike. I did a home stay- language immersion program back in 2003. My school and host family were located a bus ride outside of Alajuela and I hoped to share them with Mike.... If I could recall where to catch the bus. After some wandering around, we did arrive at the bus garage with the same little food stands as before. But, the buses have been upgraded from yellow school buses to more modern adult sized buses. The sugar cane fields and coffee fields were a green landscape to traverse through and reminded me of my time here when I watched the cane fields get cut and then burned. I also hoped to remember where to get off the bus, but that proved to be easy, as I recognized the Pavo Real market right away. The only disappointment was to discover that the school had been converted to a hotel! We enjoyed a late lunch of empanadas in Alajuela´s mercado. This evening we had an adventure trying to describe a vegetarian restaraunt we wanted to go to to our taxi driver. Turns out addresses are useless and people know things by points of reference (a block from the church, to the right of the cemetary, etc) and that is useless to us when we don´t know! So, we did not go to the vegetarian restaurant, but rather drove in circles for a bit before finally just asking to be let out and we would figure something out- and we did- a cute place with fried plantains, guacamole, yuca, and beans for dinner. Tomorrow we venture to Monteverde!