Business Trip

David says:

Yesterday was Taiwanese culture day in la plaza de cultura downtown San Jose. It seemed very appropriate because Friday night Sarah and I got together with a Costa Rican friend of Matt Chitwood who Matt met in Taiwan. We met Jose and his family and went out to dinner with them. It was great to make the connection.

We came into San Jose Friday morning because our 13 SNU students are joining LASP for their cultural trip to Limon to study racial equality in Costa Rica. It should be a great trip for them. And Sarah and I needed to come in to San Jose to rent a car until our Isuzu Trooper is released to us and also to buy the next round of food supplies. We are now responsible for purchasing the food for the student group. We are hoping that we can limit it to a trip into the city once every two weeks. Anyway, we can’t pick up the car until Sunday morning so we are using the extra time to see some movies and enjoy being in the city. Friday we saw Children of Men, which was an interesting movie. Last night we got together with Sophia, my Costa Rican sister, and her friends to see Babel. This is also interesting and well done. Today we will make several stops on the way out of town in order to pick up a number of different supplies for the students.

Interesting Cultural Tidbit: I learned this today in a taxi ride when I was sneezing. If you sneeze once they say “salud” (health), if you sneeze twice they say “dinero” (money), if you sneeze three times they say “amor” (love), and if you sneeze a fourth time they will say “perdio todo” (you lost it all). It’s pretty funny when you get the sneezes.

Funny Story: On Friday night we spent the night at LASP’s sabbatical house. On Saturday morning when we left we put the keys on the table as we locked the front door behind us. The thing about front doors in Costa Rica is that they are preceded by a carport gate that is locked and then a driveway gate that is locked as well. So when we locked the front door with the keys inside and then realized the carport gate was locked, we realized that we were locked out of the house but also locked into the carport. We were in trouble and it felt like we were caged animals in a zoo. So the next 20 minutes consisted of Sarah and I finding wide enough openings in the gate that we could possibly squeeze through. We ended up being able to push the gate open enough that we could crawl 10 feet up and through a small hole. I passed all of our stuff through the hole to Sarah and then followed. It wasn’t too hard and it didn’t look too suspicious since we were trying to break out and not in.