If you're going to San Franci....oh wait...what? San Jose? There's no song for that.

So, due to some medical appointments, I am spending the weekend in San José. I am fortunate enough that one of my friends was able to schedule her test to see if she does in fact have intestinal worms at the same time, so I am not here alone. This is a huge relief. I realized how much of a good thing this was today as we were trying to find our way back to the hotel from the hospital and I made consistent, grand errors regarding directions and landmarks. If I were here by myself, y'all would probably never see me again. Also, I hate getting a cab when I ''know'' where I'm going. Thrift and pride are okay in some situations. They are probably not so great when trying to get around San José.

It wouldn't be so bad if San José had clearly marked street names and distinctive store fronts. Well, mostly for me the distinctive store fronts. But every place sells the same clothing, on every block there's two Costa Rica-style cafés and every six blocks or so towards downtown there's a big plaza/park area.

Don't misunderstand me – I am not complaining about staying in the capital. Last night there were some sort of hipster musicians recording in our hotel, so I went to sleep with the sounds of some blues-y mellow electric stuff. This morning I woke up and lazed around under the covers for awhile in a queen-size bed. Then I got up and took a scalding hot shower and blow dried my hair. Breakfast was outside and it was not 90 degrees. All in all, quite satisfactory.

Something interesting to note...in Santa Cruz, the city closest to me in Guanacaste, I would never expect to find bookstores or gift stores that catered to foreign interests. There's not really anything sold there that's typical of Costa Rica. I guess I'm saying that there's no real industry for tourism in the city itself, which is so strange because Santa Cruz is the hub for the beaches on my coast. Yesterday I went into a bookstore with travel guides, recycled paper notecards with Costa Rica themes on them, parrot earrings made out of reused materials, soap made from local goat milk, fair trade coffee, etc. And I was thinking, ''Wow, I could get gifts for people here.'' It's definitely not like that in Santa Cruz, although Santa Cruz has it's fair share of tourists moving through. It's definitely more oriented to sustaining the local population with not much high end merchandise (by that I mean Roxy and Quicksilver) or international food chains (á la Burger King or Taco Bell). Just an observation.

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But now I'm into day two in San José. And I'm thinking – well. What is there left to do? It's weird that the last few weeks I've been excited about going home to visit. The last few days before coming here, I was pretty excited about having an appointment with the medical team so that I could come to the big city for a few days. Now in San José, I'm excited to go back to site. To eat normal food and have cafecito in the afternoon. Maybe not to be sooo hot, but at least not to be cold, haha. Oh my gosh, I'm going to die by freezing to death in November.

P.S. random thought, but even though I'm getting back into Collegeville around 9pm on Monday the 21^st...I'm eating a buffalo chicken cheesesteak. I'm going to call Bravo's ahead of time when we're ten minutes out and be like, ''Yo, last order of the night...I need this.''