Advertisement
Published: September 25th 2012
Edit Blog Post
What a long, but exciting weekend! Friday morning we hopped on the public bus at 6:30 AM to head to San Jose. San Jose is the capital of Costa Rica. I loved it. Most of the streets we were on were closed off to cars and only for foot traffic. The city is HUGE, with so many different stores, parks, etc. We walked around the city, first stopping at the central park which was huge. Next to this park is the national theater, which was constructed in 1897. It is beautiful. It reminded me of the lobby at Pueblo Bonito Sunset. Everything was decored in that way, with marble columns, floor, etc.
We had free time for lunch so me and a few others went to find a sit down restaurant. We ate at this super nice place where everyone was in buisness suits and dresses and we were in shorts and tanks... BUT the food was awesome. I had the best burger of my life with beans, guacamole, and pico de gallo for less than 9$. So gooood.
After lunch we went to the national museum, which was also really interesting. They had objects dating back to BC
days that were in awesome condition. After taking a museums class last semester it was really interesting to see the musuem from a different point of view.
The graffiti in Costa Rica is amazing. It is illegal here, so it is done at night but all of the drawings are so well done. They have some serious artistic skills and draw with purpose and meaning.
Cartago, the first capital of Costa Rica was a very clean city- yet for some reason I didn't like it as much as I liked San Jose. In the center of the city there are 'ruins' of a church. Actually, I'm not sure they can actually be called ruins because the construction was stopped before the church was completed. In 1910 Costa Rica had a huge earth quake and this was during the construction of the church. After the earthquake, they stopped construction on the church in fear that it was too tall/ wouldn't stand through another earth quake.
In Cartago there were hundreds of stray dogs. It breaks my heart to see them everywhere. Funny story: We were in the center of the city and a man was carrying his groceries
in a plastic bag. A dog followed him and kept biting the bag. Before the man could move it the dog had pulled out a smaller bag with a brick of cheese and ran away with it. He strutted by us, with the bag of cheese hanging from his mouth like he couldn't have been more proud of himself.
The main church in Cartago is huge and easily the most beautiful church I have ever seen. I can't even describe how beautiful it is in words. It has quite the history too. There is a river that runs under the church that is said to be holy water. People come from all around to drink this water and pray to the Saint for a miracle. When their miracle occurs, they donate something to the church. There is a display of some of these items in the church, some are quite extravagant.
We went to an open market in Cartago. There were so many fruits I had never seen. Whenever I would ask someone what something was, they would alway give me one to try. I had a nice little conversation with an old man at the market who
told me that not a lot of tourists come to this market. That was clear when everyone was staring and saying stuff to us...
The last site we visted in Cartago before heading to our hotel were ruins of a church "La iglesia de nuestra senora" dating back to 1693. Once again, they were beautiful.
On Sunday we headed to Tapanti national park. Here, we went to a river and got to enjoy the sun!
Sorry this blog is a little vague, a have a lot of homework to do 😊
Advertisement
Tot: 0.054s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0257s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
tourist guide
non-member comment
tourist guide
Nice post! If you wanna to have a tourist guide you need to find out a very good page...