¡El Presidente!

So I saw the president of Costa Rica (and Nobel peace prize winner) Oscar Arias speak Thursday at the opening of the new headquarters of the National Museum in Pavas, just outside the capital city, and Arias is definitely better at speaking than ole Georgey B. After the different officials spoke and the tour of the building was over, the photographer and I started heading up the street toward the main road to hail a taxi in the rain. On our way a van full of people stopped and offered us a ride to San Jose and, standing in the rain, we said yes.

After we got in, it turned out we had just hitched a ride with the president´s personal press crew. His photographer, cameraman, PR woman, scriptwriter..the whole gang. They were ridiculously nice. There are people who are personal assistants for much less important people than Oscar Arias who´d just tell us about how great they are and fortunate we were to be in their presence (trust me, I´ve met them), but we all just talked about the president, touched on CAFTA a little bit (Arias is pro-CAFTA, so they gave us these rubberbands that supported it saying ¨Yo Sí Quiero¨), and we even talked about the Tico Times (the only - or so the old folks tell me - newspaper to support him when he told Reagan to shove his plans for an air force base in Costa Rica up his you know where). I had a lot of fun getting to know them. Afterwards we joined the rest of the Tico Times staff for chicharrones (these fried pieces of pork that are really good) and platacones (mashed and fried plantain topped with salsa and meat, almost like nachos) at Union Bar downtown (named so because the unions used to meet there). Going out on Thursday nights after the weekly budget meeting is kind of a tradition for the Tico Times (What do you guys at The CW think about that?)

Saludos.