So I arrived in CR last night.
Initial thoughts - much better than I expected i.e. the city is much cleaner than a typical developing country. Just arriving at the airport, I could feel welcome.
Entebbe airport should work on improving it's terminals because the first thing someone sees as they walk into your country leaves a lasting impression. I really felt that I was in someplace beautiful when I got to the airport and there were beautiful pictures of nature, birds and flowers all over the walls. There were also numerous advertisements for touristy things one can do just minutes from the airport.

I came in to San Jose airport at about 9pm last night to 70 degrees of weather.
As I walked out of the airport, an older lady grabbed my hand and asked me something in spanish. Sandra, my gf who understands spanish laughed and said something to her. Apparently the lady was asking if I was a famous soccer player... must have been the outfit I was wearing. I thought that was funny.
We were picked up from the airport by Sandra's friends and we drove to a nearby 'soda' aka take-away aka fastfood place for some food and conversation.
One interesting thing to note is that stop lights are treated as stop signs..i.e. you can opt not to stop at a red if you don't feel like. At least that's what Urilis (Sandra's friend) told me. There are also no speed limits..just like Uganda. You can obviously bribe the police if pulled over. You don't need car insurance to drive. Generally, I could relate to a lot of the lifestyle choices here.
I also noticed that it's culture here to kiss people on cheek when greeting..I guess I'd seen that one already on tv.
So we're at the soda and it seems like the thing to do for a lot of families on a Friday nite. Go out to eat at a soda that is.
I had rice, beans, chicken, fried banana and eggs..and pineapple drink.
WE then had interesting conversation with Sandra's friends till abt 1am after which they dropped us to our hostel (Hostel Bekuo) where we were crashing for the night.
I will update this with pics of the place later on but its pretty much like a college dorm but you get ur own room.
In the morning, you get up and make your breakfast in the kitchen - pancakes, pineapples, tea and bread in our case.
There were a lot of young ppl staying with us here from allover the world.
As we sat down in the sunny lawn to enjoy breakfast, we met some unique characters:
Germany and Holland gals who have been here for 4 months volunteering at orphanage
and saving turtles
English gal (Rose) who has been touring Asia and latin america for past 6 months..she just came from the carnival in Rio and made me promise myself to check it out next year.
Now we're off to briefly tour the city before we head out to the country side and see the real CR.

PS: on the plane here, I was pleased to see a gal reading MY IShmael..great read.
I'm currently reading "My friend Che"..seems like a fitting read for the place I'm in

Since this is a work-related story, I'll swap names to save identities.
Three characters - me, Ishta, Tomlin, Jason

Ishta is fairly new to the job so she doesn't know too many people at the work place. While resolving an issue, she had to get in touch with a consultant named Tomlin on the 6th floor for further direction on how to fix it. However, she didn't know who Tomlin was. So I overheard her asking a colleague, Jason for a description of Tomlin.
Jason went on to say,"Oh, go upstairs, turn left to the consultant's pod and ask for Tomlin, they will direct you to his desk."

I felt that this was a disservice and couldn't help but blurt out,"Just go upstairs and look for the tall, black guy that wears glasses. He's probably the only black guy on the floor."

On hearing this, Jason smiled meekly and said,"I could have said that but wanted to be politically correct."

Which leads me to question, is it politically incorrect to describe a person by his skin color if that's going to accurately identify him?
Sandra, my white gf brought up another interesting point when I shared the story with her. If we were in UGanda where 99% of the population is black and someone was trying to describe her, wouldn't they describe her as a mzungu (white person).
I personally don't think it's politically incorrect to call someone black if that's what they are. What I think is politically incorrect is to be color blind.