Apologies for not updating in almost a week. I´ve been very, very busy.

So where did I leave off? I went to a rock bar in San Pedro (called ¨Sand¨ but the whole place was all about some heavy metal) on Saturday with Melissa, one of the girls who lives here. I played fuzbol with one of her friends and we won a few times but then kept getting walloped by these unstoppable guys who kept beating everyone till they quit. Of course, the games were weird because they only played to 4, not 10, and we came closest by losing 4-3. At the bar some guy was handing out flyers for a former member of Iron Maiden who´s playing on Paseo Colon on June 14. I figure we´ll go see it, cause how many people get to talk about that time that guy from that band played in Costa Rica? No one I know, thank god.

The hotel and restaurant ¨City One¨ that I reviewed was in a sketchy part of San Jose, but not all that much sketchier than the rest of the place. There were strip clubs and casinos, but also children´s museums and historic districts. It was in a location any of the visitors could enjoy, and the place was pretty nice inside. I got to go out to another club that same night called Cuartel in San Pedro, and that was an interesting place. There´s a good mix of gringos and ticos there, and they had a hilarious cover band that you could tell had performed the same Latin pop songs again and again and weren´t getting tired of it at all. So corny but so entertaining. There was this big tica fronting the band and this little tico guy backup singing, wearing a tight Hollister shirt and jeans. When he wasn´t singing he´d just stomp his feet, thrust his chest out and swing his arms from side to side. The gringos all came in groups of 20, all in preppy clothing, all taking 50 pictures of themselves before they´d sit down, douche bags at the bar waving $20 bills and making smoochy faces. Wow. Fortunately when you can´t help but laugh at people, beer helps you forget that people know you´re laughing at them. The funniest thing about these bars is that throughout the night one thing becomes incredibly obvious: the gringos want the ticos, and the ticos want the gringos, and that´s all they came for. Few people of the same nationality interact at these places, it goes the same for discotecas I visited in Peru.

On Tuesday I went to an early press screening of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World´s End (Piratas del Caribe: En El Fin Del Mundo) and I thought it was pretty entertaining. The whole series is over the top and goofy, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a kid like yourself watching Peter Pan back in the day, it´s a far superior production than what we got. Maybe because the pirates are the heroes. I almost thought they were going to turn me away from the door because as everyone walked in they scanned us over with a metal detector to make sure we didn´t have any recording instruments on us. I, foolishly, had my digital voice-music recorder on me in the top CD compartment of my bookbag and very cleverly manuevered it without suspicion from the security guard´s detection. Maybe I should do a security review of Terra Mall (which is a huge, bright, modern, elaborate, Birmingham suburbia-like mall structure with a gate around the entire perimeter that cuts it off from all the poor housing areas surrounding it.)

Tonight I went to the dress rehearsal of the play ¨Bang! Bang! Estas Muerto,¨ translated from the American play ¨Bang! Bang! You´re Dead¨ about school violence. Tico Times normally just covers plays that are in English but my editor thought it would be good since it deals with a serious issue in America. It´s being put on at the Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center in Los Yopes, and is performed by student actors from the University of Costa Rica. It was a good play, even in Spanish, though some opening parts border between interesting presentation of an important message and yuppy school counselor destruction of an important message. There were some odd adaptations for this version as well, including a brief hip hop scene between the souls of some people the main character killed and himself. But still good.

Tomorrow promises to be an exciting day for me, I´m covering the opening of the new National Museum in Pavas, and Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner, will be on hand. So hopefully I´ll actually get to meet him. My next assignment is Sunday, where I´ll go see ¨Night of the Iguana¨ by Tennessee Williams (in English) at some other theater around town.

As for tourism, uncle Tony has said that he´ll take me to the Poas Volcano or the Irazu Volcano on Saturday. I´ve already been to Irazu, so I think it´ll be Poas, which is a little farther away from here. Everyone says it´s prettier, though if you´ve looked down at the valley from the side of Irazu, it feels like you´ve seen half the country.

As for photo uploads, I forgot to bring my chord to upload, but after I get another 50 or so photos I´m going to make my first CD and put them up for everyone. So expect to see them after this weekend. Going to bed now, muchachos. Que le vaya bien.