Saturday, October 1, 2016

Costa Rica - Fancy

San Jose's Beverly Hills
Escazu is in the southwest corner of San Jose.  It's the fanciest neighborhood I've seen so far - lots of Argentinian steak houses, manicured lawns, skinny babes in yoga outfits and shiny new malls.  I visited one so new that not all the stores had opened yet.

I strolled in a book store looking for a something apropos to my Spanish level.


I found one from Spain that ironically made fun of this type of neighborhood and the people who live there.  I sat at a fancy "third wave" coffee shop and read my book.  From time to time, I closed my book and tried unsuccessfully to work out what the previous two coffee waves had been.

At work they're big on recycling so I bought myself a coffee mug.  I'd been using other people's mugs and now, with a simple $3 purchase, I would fit right in.

As I've noted before, one of the unforeseen effects of the internet is the speed with which annoying trends boomerang around the world.  There was a woman dressed like an 18th century farmer, selling artisanal popsicles from a ice box attached to the front of her hand-made bicycle.  In the supermarket, in addition to quinoa, which I only recently learned to pronounce correctly, I saw rows of kombucha tea next to vietnamese noodles and sodas whose prices were so outlandish that I recalculated them into dollars over and over because I thought I'd made a mistake. 

I was the only one there - a nervous shop girl followed me around as if I might steal something.

Even the parking lot was over the top.

The dot on the hipster i were the murals every ten feet.

A rusty old beer truck was perched outside the front door like a statue.



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