Sylvia's Blog: Notes from our trip to Costa Rica

Just a quick blog post with a few notes on our trip to Costa Rica, to visit our good friends Steve and Ilana, with their kids Benji and Marina. They've been teaching at an international school there for a year now, and are happy and tanned, but we really miss them!

Most of the pictures are here, but I put a few noteworthy ones below as well.

Here's a couple things that struck me:

My Spanish reappeared! I used to be fairly fluent (almost 25 years ago!), and it substantially came back. It helped that, before going, I had watched a lot of the TV show Arrested Development on Netflix, in Spanish. I was planning on doing more - trying to find a tutor for conversation practice, etc - but I'm glad I didn't, since my Spanish was good enough.
The currency is Colones, and there's about 500 to the dollar, so it's easy to figure out the approximate price in dollars
In San Jose, there were security people all over the place, the "guards" to whom you pay money to watch your car, also lots of security personal at the stores (for instance, the tiny little Claro cell phone store had their own security guard who opened the door for us)
Our kids had an awesome time playing with Benji and Marina. Peter usually played with Marina, and Kenny with Benji. Peter said, "It's kind of like we're two teams, me and Marina, and Kenny and Benji".
We really liked the "Soda" home style restaurant. Usually food was very well cooked, and really reasonable. I usually had rice, beans, platanos (baked sweet plantains), some salad, and some type of meat (chicken or beef).
Road closure can suck. The lodge we stayed at in the La Fortuna area was behind a road which was closed by a landslide, so we had to do a long detour many times during our stay.