Today was not so exciting. We were scheduled to be picked up by Interbus (the
shuttle/bus thing) at our hostel at 1 so we decided to chill in our tent and in the hammocks by the pool for the morning. We ate a breakfast meal at the hostel
restaurant and played on the internet. We also realized we hadn’t updated our blog in a serious while so we made the dumb little shoutout vid that we posted.
We went to a tourist shop in town where Jenny bought bracelets for Shea’s little sisters and Kelly bought a great rasta colored headband. 1pm came and went…so did 1:30. A little after 2pm we saw the Interbus pull up and our Tico driver came in to help us with our bags. Upon laying eyes on our ridiculous amount of luggage (it seems more ridiculous each time we see backpackers with their tightly packed loads on their backs) he immediately decided we were not his favorite. He muttered in Spanish to the hostel check in guy about bag charges and was a rather rude Tico if we do say so ourselves! We asked him if he could take us a mile from our set destination to a hostel other than the destination we had scheduled. This was far too much effort for him and he explained that he had to take us to Hotel Berlor as was written on our Interbus reso. We instantly went into “we miss Samara” mode and decided we had no desire to befriend this rude Juan. We piled into the Interbus – not a private ride this time, we were with 4 couples from different places. They all seemed to have soaked up a little too much of Juan’s negative energy and were rather rude also! This travel day was not looking up – until we got the giggles while Kelly bobbed her head to the awful Spanish music that Juan was jamming out with. After about 5 minutes Jenny decided she had to pee (no surprise there) and was super thankful when we stopped and hour later. We also took this time to buy some random souveniers and snack on a great ice cream treat for lunch. Back on Jaun’s bus and into San Jose.
Everyone had told us San Jose was ugly but we were not prepared for what we saw, woof! All the crammed and dirty houses were built surrounded by cages. This was clearly not a crime-free zone like Samara. We pulled up to the San Jose airport and Juan opened the door and motioned for the 2 of us to get out….uuhh, our flight was not until tomorrow morning. We struggled to explain to Juan that he was driving us to Hotel Berlor (he seemed to have lost brain capacity since 4 hours prior when he was insisting the the hostel guy that that’s where he had to drop us off). After a little more persuading he nodded and we were on the road again. Next stop, sketchy looking Hotel Berlor (ugh, nice recommendation Max!) where the army camo adorned woman said she had no space for us. We had kind of seen this on coming, hence our earlier request to go to Alajuala Hostel instead.
Next step, get in a cab. The army camo adorned woman seemed to have never heard of a cab and certainly had no clue how to call one. With the help of 2 other
Spanish woman and about 7 phone calls we were informed a cab had been called.
Where was Hillberto when you needed him!? Next we re-piled our ridiculous amount of luggage in said cab and we were on the road through San Jose again. More luggage dragging down the block to the caged in hostel. We had a room! Success!
We were both pretty certain we had seen enough of San Jose to last a lifetime and we had no desire to leave our hostel, despite the fact our room reeked like a combination of wet dog and cigarette, but a little worse. We found a pizza place with a San Jose view on one of the upper floors of our hostel (which was a reallty strange building with an Alice in Wonderland type of feel – twists and turns, random stairs, flowerboxes on the outside of room windows which looked out into the hallways and into other peoples rooms). Anyway, we paired our pizza with our last Imperial and chatted to the bartender and a random traveler before heading back to our room and trying to do some re-organizing of our poorly packed belongings. We had a choppy and short night of sleep and both dozed off thinking about how much we missed Samara.
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