Day 34: San Jose, Costa Rica

5:30am and this city comes to life. But not just any life. Think of the most noisy, obnoxious sounds you can imagine, multiply that by 80 and you have an idea of just how “lively“ San Jose gets this early in the morning. Incessant, unnecessary horn honking (it´s a red light–what do you want!?), brakes that sqeal so loudly they must have worn our the pads years ago, and the largest collection of muffler-free vehicles in the whole world all come together at the magic hour, 5:30AM, to sound off the start of the day in a truly monstrous cacophany.

After a great deal of tossing, turninga, and much cursing and unheard shouting out the window, we get up just to get away from the sounds of life outside. Today marks the first attempt to get our Brazilian visas. Those same  illusive phantoms that we couldn´t get before we left because the time we had to validate them would have expired by the time we arrived in Brazil.  After a secret maze of security checks, guest sign-ins, guest passes, special lettered sets of elevators and keycard access doors, we finally made our way to the 6th floor to the Braziliana embassy. We were met by an irritated old woman who spoke only Portuguese and was not even a little interested in our very best attempts at Spanglish. After trying our best to explain that we simply wanted to apply for visas, she abruptly left without a word and returned with a very large man who apparently was the only person in the whole place tha spoke any English at all. He was quite a nice fellow, spoke fluent English and patiently relayed questions and answers between the still perturbed old woman and us, the two silly kids who were not Costa Rican, in Costa Rica, trying to get a Brazilian visa and spoke neither Spanish nor Portuguese. After a barrage of questions, we were made to understand that we needed a special application form plus a laundry list of other documents and photos before we could actually turn in the whole applicationa packet. OK, not a huge deal. We can just get everything ready this afternoon and come back tomorrow morning.

Realizing that our visa would take much longer than we had expected, we knew that meant being in San Jose even longer than we had originally planned. Being a pretty expensive city (for our meager budgets), we headed to the super market to stock up some groceries to try and keep down our food costs while we are here. The first mistake we made was not fully exploring the kitchen of the hostel before we brought back our groceries. When we arrived back at the hostel with armfuls of groceries, we were, um, bothered by what we found. Lin opened the fridge and was met with a puff of gnats surely trying to escape the horrid stench emitting from the depths. What could cause such a horrid smell? Was it the year and a half old pizza box or the mystery liquid that might possibly have been some form of milk at one time? Or was it one (or several) of the jars with old labels and inedible colored contents? With no other choice but to store all our new groceries, we quickly shifted some things and slammed the door closed but the damage was already done. That smell lingered in the room for at least 15 minutes. It smelled like something had shat, died, and rotted inside that fridge and surely it must have been a very long time ago.

With no plans and little else to do during the week or two we would have to be in San Jose, we arranged with the new hostel owners– who were rennovating while we were there– to work 3-4 hours each day painting the walls to cut our “rent“ in half. We grabbed our brushes and we were off!