The Travel #4: Arrival in Costa Rica

  The journey continues...

(Read the previous part here)

It was 15:55, the moment I saw Costa Rican soil the for the first time. Even tough it was from 12000 metres above said soil...
Costa Rica
The first thing I noticed was the structure of the land. Whenever you lift off with a plane in europe, you see the easy recognizable pattern of agricultural-used plots, whereas Costa Rica seemed to only have a minimal amount of those. It looked wilder, untamed. And a lot of green.
About half an hour we started the descent and more details revealed themselves. I must admit, that those details shocked me a little bit. Many, many small huts with rusty metal sheets as roofs. 
- Where did I land here? - From a normal european neighborhood to this? -
But soon the plane got to close to the ground to see more of it.
16:42, that was what the clock was showing the moment the plane stopped.

Germany
Before driving off to Costa Rica, all I was hearing were things like: "Costa Ricans are so nice, so gentle." or "You won`t find any more helpfull people on planet earth than in Costa Rica!" Those sayings deffinitly were not true for the staff at the airport in San José. But it was smaller, more calm than at my old home.

After all the usual airport-procedures we left the building and got greeted by my girlfriends parents, which whom we drove to a rented flat to stay for a few days until we took off to the final stage of the trip to the home property in Guanacaste, the north-west part of Costa Rica.

I got warned. Multiple times. That it could be a cultural shock, me never having been to a country outside of europe. I was not that shocked by how it was like during our first few days, but I realized, that some perspective change was necessary.

Here are the noticable differences between a european city and San José, capital of Costa Rica:


Not my photo since I forgot to take some, but something like this



Property sizes:

Each single property is rather small compared to what I am used to. The biggest part of the city has the face of many small, one-story-buildings, side to side without garden or even driveway.

Security:

In addition to the face of the city detailed above, every property is surrounded by a secure metal fence. Every window, every door with another layer of security in form of a metall fence.
Besides the housings for the small citizens, the big parking lots of the bigger stores were secured by a tall fence aswell. Sometimes even with barbed wire. Here it is normal, but I have never seen it in Germany.
Since theft is a big issue in latin-america even the small stores have a personal securityguard on the parkinglot and inside of every store. For some probably a sense of savety but for me it was rather uncomfortable.

Streets:

Choas, pure chaos. At least as long as you are used to european roads. Sometimes wide streets, sometimes narrow streets. Sometimes streetlights, sometimes darkness. Mostly no paint on the ground or any of those reflecting poles at the sides. Sometimes signs, sometimes no signs.
I think this sums it up about right... Do not worry: You will get used to it.

Shops:

The older folks, may remember the way stores were build back in the day. In many efforts, Costa Rica looks and feels like Germany a few decades in the past. Shure, nowadays you also have the big global players like "Walmart" or "McDonald´s", but the much bigger part are small businesses in the same house as the families, who operate the shop, a living. These small shops rarely have a website, a location on googlemaps or even a phone number. This makes it really hard to support the local economy, even dough it is more important than ever, given, that you do not want the country to go down the same road as the european counterparts.



First lesson already learned. Different country. Different part of the world. Nor worse nor better, just different.
I elaborated in this post about the different kind of mentality here in Costa Rica.

Read how our experienced enfolded in the next post.
Thank you for reading.

Location: Provinz San José, San José, Costa Rica

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