It’s crazy to see the difference in lifestyles between cities just 30 minutes away from each other! It might be closer to an hour, depending on the traffic. We went into San Jose today by train and had a tour of San Jose. San Jose is a lot busier than Heredia and the streets are more populated with pedestrians. It seemed like that, even with the laid back personality of Ticos, they had a more “let’s do this” attitude than Heredia. Also, it was interesting to compare the similarities between San Jose and Pittsburgh. Both are pretty well-known cities that can be very congested with cars, at times. More specifically, from the tour, I could see that San Jose and Pittsburgh were both places that had a lot of space to explore and try new things. For examples, there’s a variety of restaurants and types of food people could eat in both these cities. Not only that, but San Jose and Pittsburgh both have a lot of people trying to sell you street art and souvenirs, on street corners.

One thing I noticed during our lunch break, was that coffee trade has some influences in San Jose. We stopped at this cute little coffee shop and noticed that on the table, there were Café Britt sugar packets. As we learned yesterday from our tour at Café Britt, they sell mostly to foreign countries because their coffee is gourmet and more on the expensive side. San Jose is a huge spot for tourism. It makes sense that Café Britt sells their products to coffee shops in this city, because generally, tourists have the money to splurge a little bit.

Another key aspect of Costa Rica that stood out to me, especially in San Jose, was the lack of street addresses. Any directions given would be cardinal directions rather than with street addresses. For example, one might say that the location is next to the Santa Maria or a yellow house on the corner of the street. This really brings out the problem of figuring out where everything is, especially for mailman, tourists, and foreigners. I believe this system of cardinal directions is very outdated and is holding San Jose and the rest of Costa Rica back. This inefficient system of directions can be made more proficient, if Costa Rica adapts street addresses into their system.