Continued from San Jose Day 2 Part 1.

There’s no many tourists in San Jose right now. I’m not sure if there are ever many tourists in San Jose ever. I know it’s low season for travel in Costa Rica right now because rainy season has already started, but weather has been perfectly fine for us so far. We came prepared for much more rain than we’ve gotten so far actually.

This is awesome, a butterfly garden!!! I didn’t do too much research prior to coming here, so didn’t expect this.

Blue morpho butterflies just flying everywhere!

They are hard to photograph though since they are flapping their wings and flying around.

Kids are excited to see the butterflies. We are all excited to see the butterflies.

The National Museum is housed in a former army barracks.

I had no idea the blue morphos was brown with spots on the underside of their wings. All those butterflies are the blue morphos eating pineapple juice.

These suckers are big.

Beautiful views from up here in the tower.

Love CL’s new pose.

The butterfly netting.

RL is still struggling up and down the stairs with her bum knee. Old.

Gotta be careful not to let the butterflies out.

Of course with so many butterflies here, there are also some dead butterflies just laying around.

They’ve got a roped off section of chrysalis. I wonder how they manage them, do they collect them from this butterfly garden and move them here or do they collect from the wild? Maybe there’s a butterfly farm somewhere?

Some of them are already turning into butterflies.

So cool. This photo was hard to get because they mostly keep their wings closed, and would occasionally randomly open it up really fast before closing it again.

From butterflies straight to Jail Cells.

This section has the history of Costa Rica, which I know nothing about. And still know nothing about really. Couldn’t really sit down and read with the kids running around.

Are those rows of toilets?

At the corner is a turret.

Small opening for guns.

Time to put these unruly children in their cells.

Cute. Now go straight to jail!

RL loving the floors in here.

Courtyard the middle of the barracks.

Cool that San Jose has mountains surrounding it.

I asked the kids to tell me what it’s a carving of. They said corn. Lol!!

Impressive how long this one was and didn’t get broken over time.

Kids pretending the round stone is our stinky dog. We all miss her, that bad little thing.

Cool tree with so much exposed roots.

Stone spheres, part of the pre Colombian Costa Rica indigenous culture.

Old water wells, always fascinating.

I’ve seen this painting in more than one place. Where’s the original?

With 3 kids, someone always needs to go potty. It was Little KL’s who needed to go poop, so we come into this stall. While he was working, he pointed to a butterfly on the ceiling. I said poor butterfly is now stuck smelling Little KL’s poop. He found that hilarious. We told the story to the girls later, and they also found that story hilarious. Kids are easily amused.

Pick the animal that most resembles our dog. PL picked the little dead rat in the fox’s mouth. Dumb dog, we miss her.

I think this is the commander’s quarters of the barracks.

Lots of murals. Love murals.

Yeah, let’s look at this one again….WTF is going on here?

Gold baby.

That kid is literally just an adult but miniature.

Love these super old wide planks.

Hahaha. They are trying to imitate the sculptures.

Printing press, but also looks like a torture device.

Carretas, traditional Costa Rican ox carts. They used these to transport coffee and whatnot back in the day.

Cool, a death mask. I’ve always been fascinated by them.

Little KL doing his best impression of a death mask.

This is a death sculpture I think. 1. That’s a giant forehead. 2. I’ve never seen a sculpture made with the face pointed down in that direction.

So much energy.

Nice family photo. It’s so hard to get a good family photo.

The legislative building.

PL took this photo for us.

Uzi?

Alright, done with museum. Leaving it the same way we came in, through the butterfly garden.

It’s getting a little warm now. Highs here barely hit 80F but the high humidity makes it feel hotter. Still a lot cooler than Austin in the summer though.

Popeye.

Grocery store shopping time. We need bug spray, water, salt, pepper, breakfast items. etc.

Finally found the produce section way in the back.

I forgot to take a photo of the label showing what kind of fruits these are.

Mangosteen!!!! You bet we bought some.

Woah!!! Giant avocados. You can see the regular large Haas avocados on the left hand side. These completely dwarf the typical giant avocados we see in the states.

It’s like the same size as CL’s face.

I looked, I asked, they pointed, I looked some more but just absolutely could not find salt in a salt shaker form. I guess we are not buying salt. Ugh. The kids were wild, and tired from all the walking around the museum. This grocery shopping trip was a lot of handle with the kids.

The cashiers here also weren’t the most friendly. We’ve noticed that Costa Ricans who can speak some English are extremely nice to us. The ones who speak no English are kinda rude to us.

No salt, but we found basically everything else we needed. Now, time to carry these heavy bags all the way home.

We’ve had a full day. The kids are complaining about their legs hurting from all the walking.

Chill on the balcony with a drink while the kids are on their ipads.

This is nice. Well until the clouds went away and the sun came out and it became too bright and too hot.

All of us on our devices. Gonna chill for a couple of hours before we head out to dinner at around 5ish.

Wonder if it’ll rain on us when we walk to dinner later.

Time for dinner. Let’s hope more restaurants are open tonight. Google Maps opening times for Costa Rica has been a hit or miss for places here in Costa Rica.

Found our dinner spot a few short blocks away.

This looks very promising.

It was completely packed and they didn’t have room for us. But wait…they said that they can make room for us if we just waited 5min. Yeah, let’s do it.

The restaurant is next door to the Mexican Embassy. You know you are in a good neighborhood when you are next to embassies.

Can our table be ready yet please? Little KL is losing his stuff.

They set us up on their private room. It’s nice and quiet, but we really wanted to be in the main part of the restaurant since it looks so beautiful.

Sweet. At one point I left our table to take a picture of the main part of the restaurant, and our server saw that. He asked me if we’d like to move to the main part of the restaurant since some of the tables are about to leave, yes please!

90% of our parenting energy goes to this kid.

Yum. Dinner was excellent. We kept the drinking flowing as well, and we were all enjoying ourselves.

Ordered a guaro based drink.

At some point, it started pouring rain and we could hear the fat rain drops beating against the roof of the courtyard. It was wonderful to listen to. We took a while to eat and almost all the other diners had already left by the time we were halfway through with dinner.

To keep the keys entertained during dinner, I thought that we’d play charades with the topic being things we’ve seen today. It was a hit with the kids, and everyone couldn’t wait for their turn.

By the time we left, the rain had mostly stopped. The whole dinner experience was wonderful tonight. Our best dining experience on this trip so far.

To be continued at San Jose Day 3 Part 1.