Hangover days

Apologies that the update is late this week. The weekend was a bit hectic and yesterday was a totally hung-over day.

Plane crashes
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We’re beginning to question our judgement in having flown to Manuel Antonio in the light airplane. There were two crashes last week. One got a lot of attention because it contained a group of American and Canadian skydivers. One American guy survived by parachuting out of the plane. He was in the Pacific for 24 hours before being rescued. Several Tico students have told me that they’ll never take a light aircraft, because there have been so many crashes.

Pub crawl San José
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We got a call from Fionn who was organising a pub crawl in San José on Saturday night. He used to work in Korea, and two colleagues were separately and co-incidentally arriving in Costa Rica on the same day, so it was a really large Irish group heading out. Fionn is from Monaghan, so he also wanted to see Kevin McBride fight Mike Tyson. We were going to Barrio San Pedro, which is the university district, beside the Universidad de Costa Rica, which has tons of really hopping bars. Myself and Jack had trouble getting into some of the bars because we didn’t have ID!

A good night for Monaghan
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Well, our night got off to good start when McBride astounded everyone and won the fight. Fionn was in his element. He works in a sports book, and was saying that the odds were so poor for Tyson that all the money was on McBride, so they’d have lost a lot of money. He seemed quite happy about that though.

El Pueblo
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Since we arrived we’ve been hearing people talk about El Pueblo. As I understood, it was an area of the city which has loads bars and restaurants. So after we finished all available bars in San Pedro, we headed out there. I was surprised to see that it’s all like an industrial estate. All the bars and restaurants were behind bars in a gated compound. To top that, we couldn’t even get in the gates. There was a security guard shot dead earlier in the week, so they were being careful about people arriving late! As luck would have it though, there was a bar across the road and we partied the night away there. I don’t know what time we got home, but it was completely bright.

Hot running water
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We discovered this week that not only are we unusual in having a phone (that can receive international calls), Internet broadband and cable TV. But we also have hot water! We weren’t aware that this was a luxury. Turns out that 90% of apartments don’t have hot water, just a heater for the shower alone. We’ve really landed on our feet.

OK, that’s it for this week. Sorry about the delay again.

Hasta la proxima semana.