February 22nd, 1997 Saturday

The waves were so loud this morning that they actually woke me up. I tossed and turned a little bit and got up at 8:00AM sharp. Fabio said he's coming at about 12:00 to pick me up so I cleaned up most of the stuff in the condo and headed down to the beach again by 9:30. I didn't care that much about the sunburn and went out and snorkeled again until about 11:30. There wasn't anything different I saw this morning in the waters, but I still had a lot of fun. I sat and dried off a bit before heading up the stairs to the restaurant and ordered some food. Fabio and his mom arrived half an hour later and we ate our lunch and chatted for a while before heading back up to the condo, packed, and left for San Jose. On the way back to San Jose (which took us over a steep mountain), several tour buses filled with gringos heading back slowed us down. I stayed at a hotel this time and it's only a few minutes away from Fabio's house. I had to get to the airport at 5:00 in the morning so it was best for all of us to do that. The hotel is a gate enclosed housing that surrounded a pool, and the room was not too bad. Fabio took his mom home and then returned with his sister to go out to eat. I didn't get a chance to see much of the city of San Jose, but it looked and felt like any of the larger cities in the US. San Jose is the capitol of Costa Rica. We went to a Japanese restaurant to eat to take a break from the Tico food I've been having and it was pretty good. I had Shrimp Tempura in Udon noodle soup and a cucumber sushi.

I went back to my room after that but didn't go to sleep until 1:30AM. I got up at 4:15AM and went to the airport. It was bustling with tourists getting ready to leave the country. The flight was good, nothing really bad happened. They showed a movie "Fly Away Home". I talked to a teacher from Long Island who invited me to go canoeing with him in the summer time in upstate New York, and also two girls my age who described the horrible ordeal that they ran into with their traveler agent. The agent actually reserved a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico instead of San Jose, Costa Rica. I guess the girls should have been suspicious about the agent when she told them that the room had "ocean view" (San Jose is in a valley surrounded by mountains). Approaching Mexico City, we saw one of the big volcanoes rumble with smoke. It was really tall! Nothing more interesting happened on the way back except when I went to pick up Fabio, American Airline had lost his luggage. :)