Up at 530 to catch the 630 bus to Alajuela- the city where the San Jose CR airport is. The trip down the mountain took over an hour and made me kinda sick. I didn't drink the night before (shocker) nor eat too much so it must have been the road because I'm convincing myself that the food I ate is totally fine. That's a tricky thing to do when all you can think about it puking like you want to die.
We arrived at the airport at 10 and took a cab to Alajuela where we were staying at Hotel Cortez Azul. We shared a cab w/ another couple for $5. It's hard to get used to these prices when you're used to paying $1 for a cab ride. Whatever we are almost home. We checked into our private room (yay!) and headed out on the town to look for a shirt for Andy and a hammock for me. It was getting hot so we got an icy drink from a street vendor this thing was sugar crack. Layered in with the ice was condensed milk powder and then red sugar syrup and on top liquid condensed milk. It was kinda gross. We tried to eat it by layers but theres no way you should eat powdered condensed milk. Once we mixed it together it kinda tasted like strawberry shortcake but it was still gross. We were prepared to go into diabetic shock.
The hammocks at $25 here, twice the amount in Nicaragua. I don't even feel like bargaining w/ these people at these prices. A dude in Honduras got one for $7 so I'm sure as shit not going to pay $25. It's OK, I'll just make one at home. We pretty much walked around town and didn't see anything too impressive, it's a smaller city w/in a bigger city. A lot of stores were closed so we went to the hotel to figure out where we were going to celebrate NYE.
We figured we could go to San Jose for NYE or we could just stay close and it would be just the same but much cheaper. We do have to be at the airport by 4am so it's going to be a early night. I found a restaurant we had some cocktails at 4pm and walked around for a bit. It's so early, how the hell are we going to make it to midnight? There are cops everywhere. Is that a good sign that we'll be protected or a bad sign that they need cops everywhere? TBD.
We found a place to have drinks so Andy got us a small bottle of Absolute and we made our own drinks because the one thing we have learned is that Central Americans make shitty mixed drinks (they gave us tonic instead of soda water but oh well). We headed to the previous restaurant for dinner, Andy had to the churrasco and I had to sea bass- delish. All we wanted were martinis, is that too hard to ask? Have we not learned anything about not ordering items that aren't familiar in the area? Apparently not because the martinis were really fucking weird. It's like they looked at a pick, saw it wasn't clear but cloudy, and since they put sugar in everything, they added caramel. Fucking weird and disgusting- and there were olives in the drink. OK, we learned another lesson. Just because it's a cocktail bar doesn't mean you can order something not on the menu and it worked out as you would expect it to.
I'm ready for bed but we are going to push forward and not crash NYE at 9pm. We head to the other areas in our 'map' to find other bars. We come across a 'biker bar'- seriously a dude was wearing a vest that said 'prospect' on it. It was OK- they were playing good 80's music. After a shitty beer we headed to the only other bar we saw. It turned out to be a nice bar so we ordered shots of vodka and this time they got the soda water right because I finally learned that soda= soda water in Central America. Next to the bar was a pizza by the slice place. You know we are def hitting that up before we leave! Several drinks and more 80s music later and it's pizza time. We have to hit it up before they close even if it's not new years yet. $3 for the biggest piece of pizza ever. Holla! Back to the hotel, we'll celebrate there. The fireworks are going nuts. Another early morning tomorrow. Happy New Years pinches!
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