Today we left the city of flowers to go explore San José, the capital of Costa Rica. As we entered San José via a 30 minute train ride, the influences of the coffee and banana trade were immediately evident. As we learned in a lecture before we arrived to Costa Rica, the railroad was constructed in order to ease the transport of coffee across the country. Since coffee is grown up high in the mountains near Costa Rica’s volcanos and needs to get to a port for exportation, the railroad was a much more efficient means of transport than the traditional oxcarts. When immigrant workers from countries such as Jamaica and Nicaragua came to work on the construction of the railroads, banana trees were planted along the railroad as a source of food for them. Thus, Costa Rica’s infrastructure is directly impacted by the integral role of coffee and bananas in the economy.

As soon as we arrived in San José and began our tour of the city, I was struck by the European influences of the city. As our tour guide explained, a lot of San José’s historic buildings are made of things imported from Europe. The Teatro Nacional (National Theater) of Costa Rica is a beautiful building with imported furnishings from Europe, such as marble from Italy. The theater has a complicated history that involves class struggles in Costa Rica due to the taxation of coffee (which was harvested by lower class farmers) being used to finance the construction of the theatre which was only meant to be enjoyed by the upper class. The history of this landmark shows that the coffee trade has influences in all aspects of the economy, even though one wouldn’t expect the coffee trade and the national theater to have anything to do with one another.

I noticed that San José (and Costa Rica in general) has a transportation system that seems to have a lot of options, but according to our tour guide, the system is inefficient due to the abnormal layout of the city and the lack of modernization in the railroad specifically. In this way, San José is similar to Pittsburgh. As we learned, grid like cities are more efficient in terms of navigation and transportation, and neither San José nor Pittsburgh are set up in this way. While the public transportation system in Pittsburgh seems to be a bit more reliable than in San José (from personal experience), I would say the two cities share similar challenges in the design of their systems because they are both experiencing rapid development. When walking through San José, it was evident that there’s a strong sense of history, but also development happening everywhere. This makes it hard to keep up with the transportation system. In Pittsburgh, it’s a challenge to keep up with rapid growth because the roads were not designed to withstand the amount of traffic they get, which is also a problem in San José.

Lastly, one of the major challenges I’ve had this trip is the lack of street addresses in Costa Rica. Locals know where everything in relation to landmarks and numbers of blocks between destinations. While this system seems to work in a smaller city like Heredia, I can see how it would be a challenge in a larger city like San José which not only has more people and tourists, but also changes faster. Landmarks might change so quickly that it makes it hard to describe a location in current terms. This is especially challenging to tourists because you can’t just put an address in a GPS. Instead, you need to ask locals where things are, but descriptions might be unhelpful to tourists due to a lack of local knowledge. This system has obviously worked for many years, but I do think it might be holding San José back. Costa Rica’s main economy booster is now tourism, so doing everything possible to make things easier on tourists might be beneficial to creating a more modern navigable city.