San Jose, Costa Rica:
As with all big cities, there are homeless people. No matter how much we travel, it’s still odd to see people just laying on the street randomly in the middle of the day. It’s difficult to not use my in-born American standards to make a judgment about someone – about what’s right/wrong or good/bad. Even though I don’t know what judgment I am making exactly, there’s definitely judging going on. I know from my friend Lynzi (who lived on the streets of Denver for a year) that a lot of the homeless suffer from mental illness. Without knowing a thing about these people I’m seeing, I do hear myself wondering (inside) why they don’t get up and go do something productive.
The national currency of Costa Rica is Colones. The current exchange rate is 582 colones to $1. But we find that prices (at least in the city of San Jose) are relatively comparable. It was weird to go to the grocery store and end up with a bill of 22,315. That turns out to be less than $40.
Speaking of the grocery store, we no longer have a permanent place. It’s amazing how you don’t think about things like spices and herbs, and things that you use for longer periods of time, until you don’t have a longer period in which to store them, and have to take them with you in a backpack or suitcase. We ended up buying garlic salt and black pepper, since those are things we can use pretty universally. Everything else we bought will be consumed this week before heading to the turtle project.
Someone nicely dressed stopped us on the street and started having a conversation with us in English. He then asked if we had 500 Colones we could give him (I don’t remember what the reason was that he said he needed it). This amounts to less than $1. I had 300 Colones in coins in my pocket, so I gave him 200. He thanked me and in the same sentence proceeded to tell us that “he didn’t do drugs, at least not cocaine or crack or marijuana or anything bad like that but he did do…” and then named some drug we’ve never heard of. And then he told us how even though he did drugs frequently, he still had Jesus in his belly and how Jesus was the man for him even though he did (name of drug).
We think he was high and walked the other direction as soon as we got to a cross street. The funny thing is we saw him the very next day while having lunch at Caf