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The water available from showers in Costa Rica
is offered in one of three temperatures: hot, cold, and "heated." Heated
means the water is warmed only after it gets to the showerhead, a picture of which is at
left. These are called suicide showers because,
believe it or not, water comes from the big pipe at the right of the frame, then it enters
the big ELECTRIC heating device at the left of the frame.
You probably can't tell from this photo, but two of the
electrical connections have been made by the use of exposed electrical tape.
The sign next to this particular showerhead says,
WARM WATER
(SHOWER ONLY)
MORE YOU WILL TURN THE
KNOB, COLDER THE WATER
WILL GET
Also, in Jaco, a seaside city on the Pacific coast, we stayed
in a hotel called The Copacabana where the shower stall did have a regular showerhead, but
on the back wall of that stall, a foot above the floor, where the stream of water from the
showerhead hits, was an electrical outlet. |
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We rented a car for three days, and we needed to
park it overnight in the capital, San Jose, where everyone told us our car would
get robbed or stolen if we left it on the street, so we parked it where our HOTELIER told
us to, which was at the gated, guarded parking lot of this nearby hotel. (If you do go to the Hotel Casa Verde WEB SITE, know
that we stayed in the Don Carlos suite, i.e., the big one.) Update of November 5, 2002: Thanks to an
alert and kindly visitor, I recently learned that the Web site originally linked to above has been removed. Note that if you click either link above
you will be taken to the version of that same, otherwise-extinct page as it was saved back in September of 1999 by the amazing Wayback Machine at ARCHIVE.ORG
(10 billion pages and counting). |
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This sign, in English and Spanish, appears above
the entrance to Manuel Antonio National Park, just south of Quepos. |
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This monkey appears in Manuel
Antonio Park. He looks real serious here, but he was actually quite the fun-loving
little rascal. He's one of a troop of
capuchins, about which you can learn a little more here. |
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We saw this sign outside a
massage parlor in the Otoya neighborhood of San Jose. |
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Is this
self-explanatory? |
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Annette and I spent seven hours
in (and $100 on) a taxi we took from San Jose to Santa Elena, way up in the lovely,
cloud-shrouded mountains of the Monteverde region (motto: "Most
Buses Driven Off Cliffs in Central America"). Annette did the canopy tour
adventure, which I'll ask her to write about for this space. What you see at left is a photo of a vacant lot I wandered past in Santa
Elena. What sort of plant is that, and what's the scale?
The scale is that those rod-like things are about ten feet
long. Does that help you identify the plant?
No? Then let me tell you.
Those rod-like things are actually lengths of
re-bar, used in the construction of a lot of buildings in Costa
Rica. They're quite rusted, so they must have been there a long time. I have no idea why
someone stuck a couple hundred feet of re-bar in the ground, but it had to
have been expensive. |
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Belmont is a cigarette brand,
and they have signs like these all over Costa Rica, like Coke does. This one
advertises the Kiosko El Bum Bum, which is a tavern in Puntarenas. Another Belmont sign Annette and I liked even better but didn't get a photo
of says at the bottom, "Extra Suave." |
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All over Costa Rica are these
tiny roadside restaurants called sodas. This one, as you can see, is about
eight feet wide. It has seating for exactly one customer, so it's a full house.
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