Continued from Chachagua Day 3.

Look at this hard working ant. The ants here are giant.

Getting breakfast, packing up, and then we leave the rainforest for the city. We would have originally left probably later in the morning, but I’ve made a reservation at an Apple authorized repair shop in San Jose, so now we’ll need to leave this hotel early and try to get to San Jose by early afternoon to make my repair appt.

Visitor at breakfast, Cherrie’s tanager.

Guaro is local Costa Rican liquor distilled from sugar canes that they drink here. It tastes sort of like vodka.

More of these giant scary looking grasshoppers. I’d freak the fuck out if one of these landed on me.

Crossed the stream on the hotel property one last time. No sloths were sighted, we looked.

Kids still behaving some…

Most of the roads in Costa Rica are like this. No shoulder, and usually a sharp drop off to a ditch past the road. Not much room for error driving these roads.

Driving in a foreign country is stressful. Google Maps is sending us to San Jose through a different road than the one we initially took to get here. I guess it’s trying to avoid traffic? We are also using RL’s iphone for navigation, which in our experience gives a different routing than my phone for some reason.

And….damn you Google Maps. This new route that it tried to send us on has us going across a mountain on this bumpy dirt road. No fucking way we are doing this. We turned around and looked on our phone for what looks to be a better way through more travelled roads.

Beautiful.

As beautiful as these mountain roads are, they are also super frustration to drive on. It’s inevitable that you’ll come upon a super slow driving 18 wheeler or truck. Then you’ll need to semi risk your life to pass them. There are not too many straight sections to pass, so whenever there’s even a slight chance of a better sight line, you just go for the pass.

Cool, a hedge maze!

I believe those are coffee plants?? It’s everywhere up in the mountains.

That’s quite the airbrush work. I appreciate how the bus in the painting also has lights.

Several of the smaller towns we passed by had these town squares with playgrounds. Talk about a true town square that gets used.

Getting to the outskirts of San Jose.

We’ve learned quickly that there’s always traffic jams in San Jose.

Unsure how much we trust Google Maps routing. It keeps trying to send us down these random streets to avoid traffic.

Getting close to our airbnb rental now. This is Barrio Amon, the neighborhood that we’ll be staying in. I picked it because it seemed like a nice peaceful neighborhood with cool colonial style houses and nice restaurants. Let’s see over the next few days if I’m correct in my assessment.

Here. We ring the bell, a doorman who lives on site comes out to greet us, open the gate, and hand us the keys. This part of airbnb always stresses me out. I always worry that somehow I won’t be able to gain access to the rental for whatever reason.

Still upset at my broken phone. The battery not being recognized solved itself overnight, so I turned it on as needed to access email and use internet. The charge port has also resolved itself so it charges now again.

Sweet, got the keys and access into our home for the next 4 nights. This is what $113 a night gets you in a nice area in central San Jose. I looked at booking two connecting hotel rooms not far from here and it’s like over 5 or 6 times the nightly price. Airbnb isn’t always cheaper, but it’s significantly cheaper in this case.

The first thing we noticed was that it felt a little warm here. We are on the 4th floor, the top floor. I went looking for the AC controls, and couldn’t find any. I could have swore the unit came with AC…but upon review on the listing again, it seems like it does not have AC. Fuck….We opened the windows to try to cool it down, turned on all the fans. This could make it for a miserable night of sleep…It’s been years since I’ve been somewhere without AC. The temperature is about low of 60F and high of 80F. It’s almost mid afternoon so it’s getting close to the hottest part of the day…Fuck. Not a great start to our stay here.

But hey, at least the airbnb is nice. We’ve got 3 different bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

They also have swamp cooler fans, but unsure how well it’ll work since the air is already humid.

I seemed to be the only one stressed out about the lack of AC. The kids didn’t mind the temperature at all. I need to take a page from their current mindset. But I’ve been stressed since last night when my phone broke. I feel naked and incomplete without a working phone and a working camera.

Little office area, it’ll be my blogging spot.

So much of Costa Rica reminds me of Taiwan. RL keeps on telling me to stop saying that though. There’s a little hallway to laundry and a small ensuite bedroom is access from this area. I wonder if this is set up as a live in nanny/maid’s room like it is in Taiwan.

Little KL has claimed this room as his. He’s excited to have his very own bathroom.

I will say, other than the lack of AC, this is a pretty awesome place to stay. It even comes with a garaged parking spot for our rental car.

We dropped off our luggage in the apartment and got back into the car. We haven’t had lunch and it’s almost 2pm. We are all getting hangry. Headed to a mall where I’ve made an appointment at an iPhone repair shop and where we’ll hope to find some lunch in the food hall.

Of course, traffic. And of course, need to keep checking the routing visually since we can’t have the voice directions turned on due to it blasting at full volume only.

We got to the mall, and parked in their garage. Sorry, no picture of the mall exterior as we were way too occupied trying to navigate in this new city.

Cool, a mall in Costa Rica. This wasn’t on our agenda to visit, but kinda cool to see what their malls look like here.

They’ve got a concert performance here in the center of the mall. A lady is belting out songs with two backup dancers. They even set up rows of seats in front of the concert and the shoppers are all getting into it.

Alright, while the kids are listening to the concert, I’m going to do a quick walk around the mall to find this iphone shop. I couldn’t find a directory or a map or any sort.

I finally had to ask some random store employee about the iphone repair place and was pointed in some direction.

Found! So, immediately, it was bad news. They said it would take at least a week for them to even begin repairs on the phone since they would need to get authorization from Apple etc. etc. So, now moving to plan B, which is to buy a iphone on the spot. I did some research last night and it seems like I won’t be able to transfer my Verizon esim onto the new phone unless I was in the US with access to a verizon cell tower. I would need to get a local sim card with some data to tie me over the next few days.

It’s also a terrible time to buy a new iPhone 15 Pro as it’s August and iPhone 16 will be coming out in a few months. Shitty that my phone broke at such an inopportune time. Sigh. To add insult on top of injury, they didn’t have the 512GB version so I had to spring for the 1TB version for more money. $1800 or so later, I’ve got a new phone. Now I need to get a new local sim card. The plan with this CR iphone after getting back to America is to give it to my mom. Again, she doesn’t need 1TB of storage, but it is what it is.

Right after getting the iphone purchase sorted, we went to the food hall for lunch. We are all beyond hungry now, and not able to make great decisions on food, But also, no one spoke any english at all in the food halls.

The kids didn’t want any of the food we ordered.

There was a Pizza Hut, so I went and ordred some pizza for the kids, and they are finally happily eating. We all felt a lot more settled after getting some food in our system.

After lunch, it’s time to find the cell provider store where I can get a local sim card.

Found the store, I took a number and had to wait a little. Then it again took a while for them to set up my account in order to get a repaid sim. Overall took probably close to 30min and poor RL had to entertain the crazy kids by herself. I got 10GB of data, and hopefully that’ll be enough to tie me over for the next 4 nights.

There was a little play area in the mall that RL tried to keep the kids entertained.

Successfully got the sim into the iphone and got local service. Celebrate with some ice cream for the kids. Now I just need to get the phone back to our airbnb where I’ve got faster wifi to set it up and restore from my icloud backup.

We had our housekeeper in Austin, who is from Costa Rica, write in Spanish in our phones that PL has nut allergies. Every time we order food, we’d show that statement to the servers to make sure we stay way from nuts.

He seems satisfied.

Done with the mall. Got new iphone, got new sim card, got lunch, got ice cream. Let’s see if I can figure out how to pay for parking using this machine all in Spanish.

Success, I think? We’ll find out at the gate if I did everything correctly.

Moment of truth up ahead.

Got it done! Now back to our airbnb to get settled in.

Back at our airbnb. This is the view from our laundry room, looks like a prison with those barbed wires. Again, all these anti theft bars on windows and barbed wires reminds me of Taiwan.

We spent the afternoon inside resting after a long day of travel and doing with all the stuff at the mall. It gets dark really really early here, like at 5:30pm. I was able to get my new CR iphone set up and worked on getting it restored. Yay!!! I no longer feel like a part of me is missing. What did suck was having two factor authorization that kept on sending texts to my phone number that’s still on my broken iphone. So I had to keep on turning on my broken phone to check for texted codes. I was constantly worried that my broken phone would randomly get more broken where it will just stop turning on. Thankfully, it never stopped working. Stupid esim. None of this would have been this difficult if I could just transfer a physical sim from the old phone to the new phone.

It’s 6:30, time to look for dinner. Look, I’ve got a working phone camera!

It’s Saturday night, and some of the restaurant that said they were open on Google Maps isn’t actually open. In fact, there are really no open restaurants on this part of the town around us. There are also some sketchy characters out at night…we decided that maybe it’s best to not come out here at night with the kids.

We did find an open convenience store. We don’t have the energy to walk around trying to find an open restaurant in this area, let’s just get something here for dinner. Tomorrow, we’ll do some more research on finding good dinner spots.

Dinner for the kids. Baguette bun hot dogs. I can’t read Spanish, and I think I accidentally bought vegetarian soy dogs instead. The kids and RL all said it doesn’t taste good. Oops.

I myself had a very sad looking premade sandwich. I think that’s chicken.

This tastes great after today. It’s been stressful with the whole broken phone ordeal. Let’s hope we’ll all feel more settled tomorrow.

Also happy to report that as the sun went down, with the windows open, it started getting cool inside. A mosquito or two did fly in, and there are no bug screens on the windows. I was able to lower one solar screen that was semi porous to act as a semi bug screen on one window. Good thing on the 4th floor, there are limited mosquitos that would fly in. It ended up getting cold in the middle of the night where I had to close the windows. Seems like it’ll be a little warm in the afternoon, but by sleep time, the temperature inside would be plenty cool enough to get a good night’s sleep with the windows open. We are all happy about that.

To be continued at San Jose Day 2 Part 1.