San Jose is a place to stay away from. The traffic is a nightmare. There are no lane divisions for traffic, so cars can go either direction on the same street. This promotes lots of honking. Sometimes a driver will stop on the street and have a chat with another driver. The traffic is a nightmare. Or leave the car on the street and go into a store.
This building is so out of place in Costa Rica. Their buildings mostly are old, Colonial structures, and the 'Ticas' seem happy to keep em that way.
Were I to visit Costa Rica again, I would fly into the airport at the Northern part of the Country ( I can't think of the name right now), and avoid coming even close to San Jose.
I will mention that there is only one paved road that I know of in the entire country. We drove over goat trails and over rivers while 'sight seeing' the Country.
It is a poor country. What the hell is cos(spit) doing there???!
There are "ex pats" in Costa Rica, but not in San Jose. Lake Arenal draws most of them. There is a College a few miles from San Jose. Maybe cos (spit) is going after the students there.
I suspect drug running up from Colombia.
You're possibly thinking of the Airport at Liberia (the CR city, not the country), Aeropuerto Internacional Daniel Oduber Quirós. The airlines just call it "Liberia", which can be confusing and even disconcerting to newbie travelers who thought they'd booked a flight to Central America.
Lest some on here get the wrong idea about Costa Rica:
I spent a 3 month "working vacation" in 2009-2010 at a little off-the-tourist-trails hamlet in the Nicoya Peninsula over on the west coast. I can personally attest that Route 21 west and then south of Liberia
are paved, thank you, as are many of the lesser roads that branch off it. I followed Rt. 21 down to Santa Cruz and it was no worse than a poorly-maintained tertiary road in rural USA. There are potholes to avoid, but you can miss most of them if you're watching the road and not barreling along hell-for-leather.
Sta. Cruz and all the towns I passed through had divider lines and well-designed traffic lanes and designated parking that was mostly observed and honored, in my experience. In my dozen-or-so trips into town, I never saw what I would call a traffic jam. Maybe San Jose is just one of the worse-managed cities in the country. Costa Rica, small as it appears on the map, is not as homogeneous as one might expect.
After topping off the gas tank of my rental ('cause Sta. Cruz was the last city/town on my route big enough to have gas stations), I took Rt. 160 westward toward the nearest beaches. It was also paved, slightly narrower and more potholes. You would probably not get bored driving in CR, especially if you're a gamer: Dodging potholes while not swerving into oncoming traffic is a lot like a computer game. You also need to be mindful of the occasional compact herd of the ubiquitous Brahman cattle crossing the road. (No, I'm not kidding.) I thought they ought to make a computer game of it, for CR school Drivers' Ed.
Or better yet, for the driver's license test. (For all I know, they do.)
The Ticos are indeed poor monetarily, but CR is one of the happiest places
on this pla...er, I mean, in the world. Most Ticos I met are openly friendly and genuinely like North Americans. There is a definite presence of ex-pats in that part of CR and it's easy to spot them on the street when you're in Santa Cruz. In this area, they're spread all around, possibly because it's off the beaten tourist paths--well, except for Tamarindo, a pure tourist trap which is more like a North American enclave than Costa Rica. You can spend dollars there and get change back in dollars and cents.
As for what the Co$ (spit) is doing in San Jose, I can't figure that either, unless they're hoping to tap into the ex-pat community. Unless they're just buying the real estate as an investment. The real estate market has boomed and tanked off and on over the years. If you can get sucker whales to buy property for you while it's cheap, use slave labor to renovate it, and then sell it when the market is up, and pocket the money---that does sound like $cientology (spit).
Which brings up the question, does a cult that runs a gambling casino have the right to kidnap its parishioners or refuse to pay their winnings if its religious scripture says it can?
