We started out by the park in front of one of the bigger hotels in town. We didn't catch the names of many places here!
There are a lot of city blocks dedicated to these parks, and they're a nice place to hang out and relax for the locals.
There are tonnes of buses taking you everywhere in this country, and they're cheap as dirt too.
Weird blue building.
This building is interesting in that it's nearly 100 years old and made entirely of metal. Most of the metal was imported from Europe to build it. It's now a school of some sort.
Hahahahahahaha. Bow before my stony greatness!
More shots of the all metal building. Kinda nifty, actually.
What park would be a parque without a fuente?
We continued to wander around downtown, which had a lot of little narrow one way streets. Finding the "core" of the city is kind of hard, as there are a couple of important areas.
One of the things we were trying to figure out as we walked as why half the city was looking up at the sky.
As we approached the shopping streets near the National Theatre and the Gran Hotel, people were still looking up.
Those not looking up were busy shopping.
Important local cuisine.
Here's what they were looking at. Apparently, there was a white balloon flying through the air.
Even lottery ticket vendors gotta look up.
Still nothing that exciting to see ...
We looked around instead of up.
More important local cuisines.
Oh stop it already!
Next, we came upon father and son feeding pigeons.
The kid would grab the pigeons' legs and wouldn't let go of them until his dad suggested the birds didn't like that too much.
It was kinda cute watching them.
"Helloooooo? Any food for me?"
This is the Teatro Nacional, one of the cooler buildings in the city.
Built at the end of the 19th century by European traders who loved the country a lot, but were saddened by the lack of theatre, the building remains one of the most elabourate in the city.
This is the Gran Hotel Costa Rica, which is noted for being very cool, very old (it's an historical building now), and slightly on the noisy side.
This is a very unattractive building next to all the others.
We paid the 3$ to get into the teatro, and it's pretty old-school on the inside. Theatre season normally only runs a few months, and is notoriously hard to get seats for.
Swanky chandelier.
Continuing our walks around, we went upstairs to see where people get refreshments at intermission.
On the cieling of the stairwell is this painting that is supposed to represent the coffee trading nature of Costa Rica.
Sadly, they got just about -everything- wrong in the photo, ranging from where the coffee is grown, to how it's transported to the beach, to the costumes of the period, and more (oh my!).
The upstairs waiting room area thingie is quite pleasant and you are so not allowed to sit on the chairs.
But there's cool art in the cieling here too.
Looking out from the Teatro
This is your view of the stage if you were sitting in the first balcony and your eyes were as horribly over-exposed as my photo was.
This is the main cathedral in town. While not quite as posh as many of those seen in Mexico and other hispanic countries, they're still quite nice and very welcoming here.
This is the national museum, which is supposed to be a pretty cool place. We kinda didn't go.
This is weird dome art or something.
This is an older church, made with lots of wood, that is undergoing renovations.
I was too lazy to cross the road to get a better photo of it all.
We kinda ran out of stuff to see, so we just wandered up and down the roads for a few hours.
Busy friday in San José!
Traffic in San José is notorious for being terrible.
¡¡aie!! help, i'm trapped!
The city is surrounded by mountains, so the weather is quite wild and varied.
Up there are a pile of volcanoes and other fun places to see. We planned to spend the next day checking some of them out on guided tours.