We left the beach today, and were forced to think about a life outside of vacation again. Our group had voted to charter a tourist bus back to San Jose that would leave at 5pm. This meant we had a lot of time to blow. Mere and I went into Quepos to check out if there were any interesting shops. Jimmy commissioned me to retrieve a Pilsen t-shirt for him if I came across one.
Mere had spotted a boutique the day before that she returned to. We bought some coffee. We went to the ATM. We almost ate lunch in several places, but we decided to just go back to the hotel and eat a pizza. We still had three hours before the bus came.
We passed the time talking to the rest of the group. Before getting fully on the road, we stopped at a gas station that was guarded by a man with a shotgun that he kept balanced on his hip. We went to the ATM in another town about 20 km away, and Frank’s ATM card was eaten.
Most of our trip was in the dark, and we were able to avoid a lot of traffic. We had to rise from sea level to two or three thousand feet of elevation. When we would ascend, the bus would nearly come to a stop and we were afraid the transmission would cease to be. When we descended for a while, we were afraid the brakes would die. It was probably good that we weren’t able to see what lay outside our windows on some of the particularly steep and curvy stretches of road.
Once we got onto the central plateau where the city is, we were traveling on big highways like you might see in Denver. We had literally spent twenty minutes in San Jose the day we arrived, so we hadn’t had much of a chance to make a real impression of the city. We had based most of our impression on what everybody else had said. We wouldn’t get much of a chance this time either. It was nearly 9pm when we made it into San Jose. We drove through downtown – it was a pretty typical urban landscape with people milling about.
Our hotel was a few kilometers past the busy part of town. We pulled into a gate that surrounded the hotel and had a look around. The hotel was right across the street from train tracks, and there were a few vagabond types milling about looking through the trash. Once we were all gathered into the hotel, Zaida said that Nathaniel Cindy, and Frank were going to another hotel. Anthony and Melissa’s room was across the street close to the train tracks in a separate building with bars on the windows and doors.
We said our goodbyes to Frank, Cindy and Nathaniel. We came to think that we were actually the only people in the hotel, so we weren’t sure why Anthony and Melissa had been given such a sketchy room. We also had goodbyes with some of the folks who had to leave really early in the morning. The rest of the night, Mere and I hung out with Team Imperial in Shiralee and Sonia’s room and watched Shrek in Spanish.
Our hotel itself was actually really nice. It was a large, well kept together, old house with wood floors and fancy double doors in each room. It was clean and cool, and the beds were really comfortable.
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