Monday, February 27, 2006

Blech, errands. I hate mailing things home. Every country has different rules and different packing items that you have to go hunting for. And of course we never know them in advance because we just got here. The post office took a whole afternoon.

We changed money on the street. Not much, just 100 cordobas (worth about $5 USD) that Michael found hidden away and wanted to get rid of. As we were getting ready to do the deed, a woman standing in line at the bank caught my eye. She gave me a discreet, tooth-clenched nononono headshake.

But why? Is it illegal? Are we going to go to jail? Counterfeit? Bad rates? What, what? We wouldn't have bothered with the shady guy on the street if the bank hadn't already laughed at Michael's cordobas. I whispered in Michael's ear about the head-shaking woman, but he didn't care. I looked again and she did it again. Nononodon'tdoit.

Well, we did it. And it worked out fine. If we got a bad rate, it was better than having a 100 cordoba souvenir, and if the colones we got were counterfeit, nobody noticed when we spent them. And we didn't get in trouble. But that was nice of that woman to try to warn us... of whatever.

The people are nice here... sometimes too helpful. In the supermarket I spotted some mouthwatering chorizo in the cured-meats section, but I didn't know if it needed to be cooked. There is a type of Spanish chorizo I buy at home that does not need it, but we've encountered dozens of types on this trip, and there is some that obviously does need cooking. So I asked the lady working in that department, "Puedo comer sin cocinar?" and "Necessito cocinar antes de comer?" ("Can I eat without cook?" "Is it necessary to cook before eat?")

Well, she started telling me about how that particular chorizo is meant to be sliced and prepared with rice in some kind of paella and this and that. It sounded delicious, but I don't have a kitchen to be making paella. I'm just trying to find out if I'm going to get trichanosis if I eat the chorizo. But I couldn't figure out how to say that. So she was super helpful, but yet not.

Out walking last night, looking for somewhere to eat, we were suddenly in the middle of a fireworks show. They seemed to be coming from the roof of the Holiday Inn a few blocks away and we had a great view of them. We did not know what the occasion was.

It did not seem to be a very choreographed show. It was more like someone had accidentally dropped a match on a fireworks shipment. We barely had time to appreciate one giant red bloom before six gold streaks were rising into the sky and exploding in little fizzy puffs. Everything was happening at once.

But I loved it. It was like the handfuls of flowers a child might pick for you in the park, rather than a carefully arranged floral bouquet from a fancy shop. Michael lost interest about halfway through, but I watched the whole thing. And it was good timing, because the fireworks stopped us in our tracks right in front of a store with a display of assorted Maglites in the window, which seemed like a good prospect for purchasing Maglite bulbs.

We went back to that store today. It turned out to be a gun shop, but they had a wide selection of Maglite bulbs right on the front counter. I'm so happy to have replacements. The Maglite is a beautiful thing, and the fact that you can store a spare bulb in it is just genius. (Even more genius would be to make sure you actually have a spare in there before setting off on a year-long trip, so that if your flashlight craps out while you're on a tiny island with no electricity, you'll still be able to read your Harry Potter after dark.)

So now we're off to Panama City. Hopefully. Tica Bus told us that the trip was booked up through Friday, but we're going to show up anyway and see if we can get a last-minute seat. The Tica Bus staff in Managua also said they were sold out but when we got our "waiting list" seats, we found the bus it was only about three-quarters full. So we have decent hopes for tonight.

 

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This guy's face is all over town. It's creeping me out.

From palau.org: "More than 401,000 people were reached through Luis Palau’s week-long festival and outreach in San Jose, Costa Rica, with more than 17,400 giving their lives to the Lord."

The fancy hotel had wi-fi, so we had a lil drink there.