Lunes en El Coco - Monday in Coco

A week ago today (Monday, January 28) we left Boston in the morning and arrived in Liberia, Costa Rica at 7:25 pm, staying overnight in the Hilton Garden Inn near the Liberia airport. Tomorrow will mark one week in Playas del Coco. It's hard to believe we have already been here a week. Time flies when you're having fun!

Today got off to a slow start. We skipped our usual early morning walk in order to wait to meet the cleaning lady who was supposed to be here at 8:30 am. A couple of hours passed and she did not appear. Oh, she's on "Tico time", we thought. We decided to do some laundry in the shared laundry room, and there we discovered that there was no water. Ah, that explained why the cleaning lady had not been there. As it turns out, the water was off for several hours today - an occurrence that our neighbor Colleen tells us happens at least once a week. Shortly after the water did come back on, around 2 pm, two cleaning ladies arrived, and within half an hour they had our condo spotless. What a pleasure!

After a relaxed afternoon by the pool, swimming, reading, and blogging, we got dressed and began our walk into town. Our mission was to have some dinner and perhaps do some grocery shopping.

On a path near the beach, I heard a rustle in the dry grass, looked over, and there was a small iguana - maybe a foot long, with concentric colored circles around its body. It was eating the tenderest leaves on the sparse ground cover. We watched it for several minutes. The first iguana I have ever seen in the wild.

While watching the iguana, a couple walked by, spotted the little fellow and joined us. "Ooh, un iguan," she exclaimed. We began to converse, and discovered they were French Canadian. French was their first language. English, of course, was ours. And all of us knew varying degrees of Spanish. The conversation that ensued turned out to be trilingual, with each of us flowing in and out of the three languages, sometimes combining words and phrases from all three languages in one sentence. Without all four of us being fluent in any one of the languages, we all still managed to make ourselves understood. Fascinating.

After walking the beach to town, we sat and gazed out on the water, watching pelicans and other seabirds dive for fish, boats at anchor or coming and going, the sun dropping closer to the ridge of the mountain behind which it would set. Then, getting hungry, we set out in search of a place to eat dinner.

Almost immediately, we came upon a small Tico restaurant, Soda Teresita, right across the street from the beach. I had read about this soda in the Lonely Planet eBook on Costa Rica. Although it is very small and does not look that enticing, we had a beautiful view of the beach and sunset, and the homemade cooked-to-order food was delicious. I had pollo frita (fried chicken) with platanos (plantains) and un ensalada (salad) that looked like cole slaw only without the mayonnaise. Bob had an equally tasty meal of pork chops (chuletas de cerdos) with papas fritas (French fries) and salad.

Afterwards, we strolled up the main drag, stopping at the gelato store (helandria) for another taste of this heavenly Italian ice cream. From there, we investigated the bus schedule to and from Liberia - a trip we are planning to take tomorrow - and then stopped at the SuperCompro (a supermarket) for a few things before catching a taxi home.

 

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