Continental flight almost 5 hours flying time to San Jose from Newark was sold out and left an hour late. Food was awful, even in business class. 757 does not have power ports for appliances; only 777 and some 767 has them. Buy a DVD player with good headphones and an extra battery. I bought a 7 inch Sony and the Bose Acoustic 2 headphones (sleek design, noise cancelling which is great on airplanes, and compatible with airline audio systems) – this is a great adult toy worth having because there is virtually nothing to do on these flights, even in business class. Airport arrival is excellent; passport control is fast and you prepay for taxis with uniformed people around. $9 to the hotel (everyone seems to prefer US dollars and the ATM’s give you a choice of dollars or local currency; almost everyone you run into on the tourist circuit speaks English too; tap water in San Jose is also safe). Late night snack at the Costa Rica Marriott hotel, just 10 minutes drive from the airport.
Friday a 5½ tour from 10:30 to 4pm. Drive 1½ hours to the Aerial Tram, make sure you have a reservation before going there because the park fills up and can only take so many in at a time; 1 hour tram ride through the tropical rainforest (even kids seem to enjoy the ride) in an open gondola like a ski-lift. 15 minute orientation video and a half hour nature walk. When your guide points out the poisonous snake and the ants you are impressed with his sense of the forest, till you find out that each group each day sees the same stuff in the same place. This attraction is safe, clean and managed very well — we found this to be true across the board. We are there for a wedding; Friday night there is a welcome party with a big buffet in a private villa on the hotel grounds with a Cuban band. The food at the hotel is some of the worst I’ve had in a good hotel; just like a Disney-property hotel – too much of it frozen, canned and pre-fabricated from Marriott Central. I ate some quiche on Friday afternoon for a snack and I am nauseous all evening from it and barely kept my composure for the party. What I will find out later is that the food all over is lousy and that this hotel is about as good as it gets in this country.
Saturday a very slow start and sit at the pool and enjoy the spa; treatments here are half the price and half the quality. My facial featured something that felt like Brillo pads (something you scrub pots and pans with). In the evening was the wedding; the ceremony was in a prominent Catholic church with a bishop running the service, a 15 piece orchestra and an opera singer doing “Ave Maria”. Things to know: the wedding service lasts an hour and is inserted into a Catholic mass (something we didn’t know going in); the bishop mentions Jesus at least 100 times in his sermon and which we were told was a lot of fire and brimstone (which was in Spanish so we didn’t understand any of it), and half the people in the church don’t kneel or take the Eucharist. Half the people in the church were not Jews or Protestants; evidently, lots of Catholics don’t buy into the Vatican’s ideology and choose not to participate in the essential elements of a Mass. At least that’s what we were told. They are looked at by the others who do as “bad Catholics.” This was a shocker for me; imagine walking into a synagogue and half the people refuse to participate in the essence of a service. The Vatican clearly has some problems with its own flock to deal with, and this wedding was in the middle of Central America, a pretty Catholic place. Consider this: the priest stands up and talks about marriage; he never married and doesn’t intend to. His speech about marriage rang false to us and others; people we spoke to leaving the church mentioned that to us. (A different interpretation of the wedding service from someone who disagrees with my observations and conclusions appears at the end of this article.) Afterward the wedding reception which featured dinner at 11 and the 35 piece National Symphony playing for the dinner hour; a kick-ass Latin band, a 3am buffet, and more till about 5am. Karen and I (as well as a good many Gringos) cut out after midnight.
Sunday another 6 hour tour, this time to the Poas Volcano. It is an hour’s drive from the hotel. Be sure to arrive by 10:30; it gets cloudy early and cars line up at the entrance. People who arrived after we did came for nothing. Once you arrive it’s a 400 meter walk to the crater viewing area. Skip the lagoon walk and conserve your energy; half an hour away is the La Paz Waterfall park with a 1 hour nature walk that has lots of steps (but almost all of it downhill) where you will see butterflies, hummingbirds, orchids (in May), several waterfalls. The buffet lunch is worthwhile; at least the rice, beans and pita are fresh. A shuttle bus takes you back to the entrance after you finish the walk. The executive lounge at the hotel is a good place to view the sunset which is usually at about 5:30pm; this area of the world is close to the equator (about 10 degrees latitude) and sunset time is fairly constant. For this latitude, the weather is extremely pleasant (about 75-80 degrees during the day, 60’s at night with low humidity, and we had great weather throughout our stay, although this is the dry season and we were told that we were extremely lucky). Tonight people are watching the Super Bowl; we went out to dinner at a local restaurant and the food was somewhat better than the hotel, but not by much. Souvenirs made of wood are very nice; the prices at all the shops are fixed and we bought beautiful place mats for $35 each that look great on our mahogany dining room table. Our driver was a good one; Felix Sandoval phone 832.6846. Taxis are run by a company aligned with the hotel; everything here is organized and there is no nonsense. It is worthwhile to have the travel office in the hotel arrange things; do not count on the concierge to arrange everything; the travel professionals know their job well and there are some unpredictable things in Costa Rica (ie: you shouldn’t just show up to major tourist attractions without reservations and/or tickets – you could be in town on a day when a cruise ship comes in and wind up behind a few hundred people if you didn’t reserve in advance).
Monday a 3 hour tour to see the city of San Jose and its environs. Escazu is a fashionable suburb with many expats and a good view of downtown from its serious houses on its mountains – the view is like Santiago or Beverly Hills but a bit more lush than these two semi-arid locales; the country is relatively well-off for Central America but it is still very poor and homes have bars all over them; earthquakes happen so buildings are not tall. City center looks like Hialeah (a section of Miami) and there ain’t nothing much there except the National Theater and National Museum. The Museum is closed on Mondays so we missed it; the Theater is a gem of the country and worth seeing. We were lucky and stumbled upon a tour; there are many interesting features to note inside the theater regarding its construction and history. Short visit to the covered indoor market (you could skip it). There is a $26 departure tax; when you enter the airport, turn right and there are many counters with no lines for the tax as well as to enter the secured portion of the terminal. Toward the left are longer lines and fewer counters to pay the tax. Food options at the airport are really bad – Burger King, Papa Johns and that’s about it. They do serve kosher salami sandwiches under seal though if you dare to buy them (there is a nice Jewish community here). No business class lounge; plane is over an hour late. If you go to gates 2 & 3, there is a carpeted area with air conditioning and lots of electrical outlets and modem ports (Costa Rica runs on 110 volts with the same outlets as in the US). Newspapers from the US arrive after 2pm at the airport and in the hotels. American Airlines is a 4 hour flight back to New York; same lousy flight as the one coming south. We find it amazing that neither airline does anything to distinguish itself in business class (they both serve the same inedible vanilla ice cream) and AA offered canned peaches for desert, and Continental had this vege loaf with mashed potatoes and peas that would make any kid revolt in the school cafeteria. It’s getting to the point where even here you might as well bring your own food aboard. I wouldn’t mind if the French nationalized the airline industry; at least the food would improve, even if they would always be on strike.
A few random consumer-oriented notes on rental cars, by the way, given several experiences this year in New York: 1. when renting, make sure the gas tank is full. 2. when renting, inspect the exterior of the car before you leave. if there is damage, have them note it on the contract. you don’t want to be blamed for pre-existing damage. 3. mastercard and visa allow you to decline the collision damage coverage and save you some money. american express doesn’t have this feature.
For Photos of Costa Rica click here.
Additional note: On the marriage ceremony, I admit that this is the first such service i’ve witnessed, and i only know what i saw and heard, and even then the actual event wasn’t in English. I got a few responses, one from a Catholic who agreed. But, one of my friends who was there, a devout Catholic, takes issue with my report, and his comments follow in the interest of keeping GlobalThoughts true to its mission of exchanging ideas and information and offering a balance of context against one man’s personal observations and conclusions:
“Another person who was present, a practicing Latin American Catholic currently living in New York,
had a very different take on the wedding ceremony. He points out that many Catholics do not place
as much importance to the mass portion of the wedding ceremony as they would the regular Sunday
services that they attend, and this may explain why so many people did not participate in
communion. He points out that if the wedding had taken place in New York on a Saturday, he very
likely would have foregone communion in favor of receiving it the following day, at his regular
church. He also notes that taking communion is a solemn and personal decision that only the person
in question can make at the time is it offered. According to him, a person needs to be “ready” to
accept communion, which means that he has either confessed his sins prior to confession or is
otherwise of a clean conscience. Someone who chooses not to receive communion, therefore, is much
more likely motivated by a reverence for the church and the requirements for communion, than any
policy differences with the Church.
As for the lack of kneeling on the part of some attendees, he points out that the church used old
wooden kneelers that made kneeling very uncomfortable, even painful for some people. Women,
especially, may have had a problem kneeling given that they were wearing expensive gowns and
stockings, which could be ruined as the knees support the weight of the body over the wooden
kneelers. More modern churches use padding on the kneelers in order to avoid discomfort.
According to him, in churches where no kneelers are provided, or where kneeling is problematic, it
is perfectly acceptable to sit, instead of kneeling, without anyone questioning the non-kneelers’
“Catholicness”. He also points out that some people who did not kneel, for the reasons given
above, nevertheless participated in communion.
Finally, this friend took issue with what he saw as an implicit swipe at the Catholic clergy in
general. While agreeing that the friar’s message seemed contrived, he attributed this more to an
inability on the part of the friar to communicate effectively. Indeed, he correctly pointed out
that the friar began his talk by conceding that he was always at a loss for words at wedding
ceremonies. The other problem my friend pointed out is that the friar took the unusual step of
giving marital advice in a way that seemed too personal and specifically directed at the bride and
groom. Normally, the priest talks about the importance of marriage within the church and future
role of the new couple in bringing children into the world, etc., as well as, in general, the issue
of communications, patience and understanding, which, according to my friend, apply, in any event,
to all human beings regardless of marital status. He believes that the comments suggesting that
priests were inherently incapable of providing advice about marriage were misdirected, and that
most Catholics are comfortable with the tradeoffs inherent in a clergy that for many centuries has
chosen to devote its time exclusively to the service of its members (instead of their own
families).”
