Into the swing of things

Alright, so I wrote the three stories over the course of yesterday and today...and though I´m proud of my resilience, I´m not proud of the final product. One was about how to ship things (from letters to furniture) out of Costa Rica, the other was about how to ship stuff into Costa Rica, and the third, which, OK, I kind of like, is about how people buy post office boxes and physical addresses in Miami and have companies ship the things they buy online from US businesses down to Costa Rica. Most businesses won´t ship outside the US, for reasons of cost to reasons of exclusive distribution of certain products, but creating a foreign address makes a loophole in the system so you can buy whatever you want from anywhere.

I´ve already started learning that sources in Costa Rica are very hard to keep up with, in the government and the private sector. Absolutely no one would pick up the phone at the Public Health Ministry (which gives permits for shipping restricted items into Costa Rica) or at Correos de Costa Rica, the national postal service. A lot of the information in my stories I just had to pluck from their official Web sites, so it´s legit, but looks like shit to readers, or at least to me. Other sources, they´ll tell you they´re sending something to you later in the day...and then it never comes.

Tomorrow I have a much more relaxed story assignment, where I´m just accompanying this photographer on a photo essay about the Central Post Office in San Jose. I´ve seen it before, a very big, colonial-style building that´s a faded lime green color, and it´s been there for a hundred, maybe two hundred years. All I have to do is make a little write up about the building and maybe talk with someone who works there. Facil.

Coronado is pretty, but quiet. I want to take pictures but so far I´ve spent all my daylight in San Jose and by the time I get home it´s either dark or raining. The two daughters of my host aunt Iris, Tanja (17) and Melissa (24) who I guess I´ll call my host friends, took me out to downtown Coronado last night for a hamburger, and they said that´s about as exciting as Coronado gets. The city is still celebrating La Semana de San Isidro, but all the activities downtown are for kids. They took me into the church in the main square, La Iglesia de Coronado, which is the only gothic church in the whole country, and inside there were more celebrations for San Isidro. We walked in at the end of this mariachi-like performance where a band of men decked in traditional black suits with trumpets and guitars stood at the front of the church around a little statue of San Isidro. As soon as I found a spot on the wall to lean against, the band filed out into the rain, still playing.

On an important movie-related note, we passed a sign for Spider-Man 3, and Melissa pointed her umbrella at it and exclaimed ¨¡Que decepcion!¨ And yes, I agree.

So basically I´ve spent the last few nights either studying my Spanish or watching TV with uncle Tony, who continues to astound me with his stories. He has met presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Reagan. There´s this funny story about how the Irazu Volcano, the oldest in Costa Rica, had not erupted for many, many years until President Kennedy arrived for a visit. The same day Kennedy got here, it started erupting, and it stopped when he left. It was also during these eruptions that Tony´s friend saw alien spacecrafts rise up out of the volcano...hmm...

Melissa invited me to go out with her friends in San Pedro on Saturday, so I´ll finally get to take the city night life back in. Until then, well, hello uncle Tony!