Heading back to the UK

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was unsure what I was going to be up to for Christmas. Nicaragua is great: I’d made a nice little circle of friends that I know I’d have a good time with, the weather was good and getting better, it’s cheap, … On the other hand, I’ve not been back to the UK for about 5 months, and there’s a bunch of family stuff that I should really do, even on top of the normal Christmas drill.

Then, one Friday night I was heading out to my normal 2-for-1 G&T at Pelican Eyes when I stopped off at the ATM to get some moolah. The ATM had power, a connection and money so it started promisingly, but my “Transaction was not able to be processed at this time”. Thinking that HSBC had forgotten I’d told them (twice) that I was in Nicaragua, and it really was OK for me to use my card here, I went to Pelican Eyes and made a note to call the bank the next morning.

When I did call them, it turned out that someone had cloned my card and used it to buy $1600 worth of (probably crap) stuff in a Wal-Mart in Houston, TX. So! The card that had been on temporary hold was now cancelled, and a replacement could only be sent to San Francisco.

As I now had $5 cash to my name, and no obvious way of getting any more, I decided take the hint and go back to the UK for Christmas. Apart from anything else, the Nicaraguans have a charming tradition of “waking the baby Jesus” in the run up to navidad, which involves running through the steets at 2, 3, 4 and 5am shouting, trumpeting, drumming and beating pots and/or pans.

So! I am now back in Costa Rica, flying to LHR via Houston on Sunday morning. Will stop off in Houston and beat the shit out of the first person I see in 800 pairs of budget white socks.

Street names in San Jose

I was wandering around in San Jose today when I noticed they have a strange approach to naming streets. It’s similar to the system in the USA where they have a large swathe of blocks split by numerical avenues on one axis, and maybe alphabetic streets on the other – something like that. But in San Jose, they’ve put the origin at the centre of the city, not at a corner.

So, in San Francisco, 1st Street is way out to the east, and numbers increase as you head west. In New York, there’s more random streets lying around, but 1st Street and 1st Ave is at the south-eastern corner of the swathe of blocks, with numbers increasing as you head north and west.

In San Jose, there’s an Avenue Central and a Calle Central, which cross at the heart of the city. From there, you find odd-numbered avenues and calles as you go north and east, and even numbered avenues and calles as you head south and west.

Not much of a change, but still enough to confuse a clueless gringo wandering around looking for the National Museum.

So, if that was confusing, you’d think that a city laid out using polar co-ordinates, rather than Cartesian, would be completely bewildering. However, that’s what Burning Man did: see? And considering I was wandering around the place in a complete daze for most of the week without getting lost once, I think polar city layouts could be the biggest advance in town planning since Napoleon came up with the idea of putting odd- and even-numbered on different sides of the street.

Costa Rica!

So my visa waiver for the US runs out on the 5th November, meaning I had until Wednesday to leave the country or face dire consequences; orange jump suits and such.

I was originally planning to head back to the UK, see friends and family. However, after some ponderment, I decided it would make more sense for me to delay that trip until Christmas and head somewhere else temporarily. This place had to be in a similar time zone to California, easy to get to, have good internet access and preferably nice countryside and things to do. I was toying with Canada for a while (as our first hire is currently based there), Baja California in Mexico, as well as Belize and a couple of other Central American countries.

In the end, I’ve settled for Costa Rica because it’s pretty stable and developed for a Central American country – the only unarmed democracy in the world – plus there’s a huge range of natural deliciousness. It’s got reef, dry and wet rainforests, volcanos, beaches, lakes, mountains, … There’s rafting, kayaking, world-class surfing, kiteboarding and windsurfing, … And internet.

I flew down from San Francisco via Houston, arriving in the capital, San Jose, at about 4pm, cramming Spanish phrases all the way. The plan is to stay here for a couple of days then head somewhere a bit quieter and more rural.