In which I explore San Jose and get cultural

After hours of beautiful sleep I awoke to the sound of someone in my dorm who had appeared to have wrapped each piece of clothing in a seperate plastic bag and was now creating a one-woman crinkle-fest going through each of them in turn. Yes, I am cranky in the mornings.

Braved a cold shower... apparently, according to the sign, in Costa Rica the more you turn the shower on the colder it gets, therefore to get it warm you have to hardly turn it at all, or in other words, keep it off. In other Costa Rican bathroom news it appears it is much the same as Chile in that you don´t flush toilet paper but put it in the bin, at least I hope so or I have seriously pissed off the cleaner.

Had an awesome breakfast of rice and beans (with magic spices that makes it in Costa Rican favourite ´Gallo Pinto´), plantain, scrambed eggs and little tortillas. I could get used to this! All fuelled up I headed into the city to explore.

San Jose seems like a mix of other cities I´ve been to, it has the grid system of roads, the hundreds of street vendors selling everything and anything on the pavements and the surrounding collar of mountains like Santiago in Chile. But it also has a very tropical feel with the heat and the banana trees and exotic fruits like Havana. Other things about San Jose include:

- the pedestrian crossings make little chirping noises like birds
- there are loads of butterflies
- there are a hundred and one clothes shops but you can´t buy a guitar for love nor money
- despite the heat everyone is in jeans and you´d look pretty silly if you were the only one in shorts having rashly thrown away all your long trousers after getting sun-stroked while on holiday in Wales.

Apparently "rainy season" is not just a turn of phrase and it is really hot and sunny in the morning but then there´s a bit of warm rain in the afternoons. Nice and refreshing though.

After my delicious breakfast I decided to shun the crassness of the many McDonalds and Burger Kings in the centre instead going for real authentic fayre: Taco Bell. But hey, a burrito filled with nachos (?! I need to get better at ordering, at the minute I just say all the words I recognise) for 70p isn´t half bad!

Decided to keep on with the cultural exploration by going to the cinema where I saw Karate Kid (dubbed in Spanish. I now know how to say "Haiiii-ya" in Spainsh! It is "Haiiii-ya"). Watching little Jaden Smith deal with moving to a big, scary, new county gave me an idea....but walking home up hill made me out of breath so instead of learning the complex, discipline of martial arts I have decided to just keep air-karate-chopping at the men who sometimes try and pester me on the street. This is working very well, if only by making me look like just the unstable kind of oddball their mothers told them never to pester.

I quite like San Jose but the wide, grid of roads gives tantalising glimpses of the forest-covered mountains beyond and the hostel is full of people that have been to amazing places. I could go see the leatherback turtles nesting tomorrow but instead my plan is to wait until I have hopefully made friends to go and do the fun things.

I am feeling happy and not too panicked but it did bring home to me how alone I am when I tried to get a SIM for my phone and the lady asked me for the details someone who knows me in Costa Rica and I had to say "I don´t know a single person". But instead of making me sad like I was in my first weeks in Chile I am just really impatient to get on to uni (I´m moving to the town later today) and meet people. Fingers crossed they´ll be someone who wants to go turtle spotting with me.

Lessons learnt:

One UK pound = 785 colones. This means I am quite quickly having to learn my 785 times tables! Also it means everything costs big numbers. As there is no Offspring song that goes up to 140,000 I haven´t had much reason to practice the bigger Spanish numbers.

Everyone here seems to speak really good English but I am stubbornly keeping on in Spanish, even/especially if it means I keep eating nacho-filled burritos.