Saturday, February 9, 2013

Costa Rica Day 4

The beach right in front of the hotel is mostly sand, but a little west there are rocky spots; we go there in the morning and snorkel around the rocks, looking for fish. One small electric blue one, several that were yellow and black striped, one pink fish about 18" long, and a couple of little speckled brown and sand ones that see me coming closer but stay put, trusting in their camouflage. As we get out and head back to the hotel, we go past a guy on the beach with a fishing pole. It occurs to me "I could tell him where some fish are, behind those rocks; but I went in the water and found those fish and saw them up close. I'm not telling him that those fish are there."
Back at the hotel we have a dip in the pool; there are little pink flowers on the water, blown down from one of the trees by last night's winds.
We talk with Jorge, who handles reservations and answered a lot of questions for us before we came. He is pleasant and genuine, all smiles.  In the gift shop we get a brown tee shirt for Josh, plus some jams: dragonfruit, lemon jelly, passionfruit, and pica pica salsa. We arrange a zip line tour for Sunday, then pick up some jewelry from a beach vendor, a puka necklace for me and an orange-red for for Diana.
We walk into town, about a kilometer. No sidewalks most of the way, we're just going along the edge of the road until except for a few blocks of central Tamarindo. As we're coming into town, there's a girl walking along on the other side of the road, wearing shorts and a bikini top; a local guy on a scooter calls out "Aye oo!" as he drives by her, and she gives a little wave to acknowledgement the compliment. There are a few girls walking around with just bikinis, no coverups--and a couple of them have a palpable attitude of "Look At Me, I Am Being Sexy"--but most girls have something over their bikinis, and the guys are in board shorts rather than speedos. In the grocery we buy amaretto cake, banana cake, a couple of bottles of juice, snack cakes called Tuaregs. We stroll through town, visiting a couple of shops where Diana can buy clothes. The clerks here are mostly local girls, and they're notably short--some of them not up to shoulder height on me.  Dinner at Copacabana; Diana has Thai, I have "trio typico", which is nacho chips, black beans and corn in the center, and around the outside are pico de gallo, "cream cheese" which is thinner than our cream cheese but thicker than sour cream, and guacamole. Pretty good, and about the only thing on the menu that's "Costa Rican", although they have spaghetti and hamburgers and Thai and Hawaiian mahi mahi and such.
We walk back to the hotel by way of the beach, looking at the sunset, fiery in front of us, fading to violet over the hills to our right, and then the stars come out.

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