27. San Jose Costa Rica

27.

San Jose, Costa Rica:

This modern mountain city is fine! The climate is ideal and the citizens like North Americans. (I have found that the people of other countries South of the Border like to be called “Americans” too. “South Americans”.)

There is an excellent new library here with a large collection of books in Spanish and English and a national museum featuring what I am sure is the world’s largest collection of “sacred metates”, basalt grindstones for corn, carved with figures of alligators and jaguars—very practical kitchen artwork from the old days. The museum also has examples of the “child cuts gold foil” jewelry I saw in Mexico, which the museum suggests originated in the Columbian Andes. That area seems to be the mountain birthplace of early cultures.

I like San Jose so well I enroll in a Spanish language school, the “Centro Cultural Costaricense-Norteamericano” for the last two weeks of their current semester. There are several other non-Spanish speakers in the class,, which makes the two-hour class each day a little more comprehensible to me. The academic study of Spanish grammar is very helpful and useful right now though I usually don’t like classroom study of foreign language very much.

I pay for my classes by designing a brochure for the school.

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