Costa Rica

It's a nice place to visit.  Also I might want to live there.

I'm in Costa Rica on business -- working with a number of software development contractors I've helped hire for my company.

I'm not naming names or agencies or numbers right now, but I can share the non-work stuff.

I heard October was usually quite rainy, but the two days I've been here it's been quite clear and beautiful.   70-75 all the time.

The work is in San Jose, the capital and largest city, which is in the middle of a country in a big valley between mountains and volcanoes.  here's the view from my hotel room:

 It's pretty far south (about 10° north latitude), so the days and nights are fairly equal.  It's on the east side of its time zone (Mountain time -- UTC-6 [during daylight savings, -7 otherwise]), so light is early -- 5am-5pm.  It felt weird to be light at 5am, and weird to be dark at 5pm!

It's also about 3700 feet above sea level, which i didn't notice until i tried to jog:

I'm not an amazing or fast jogger, but i think the extra 3000 feet got to me.  I knew something was wrong -- i thought maybe it was pollution or sickness or something, but it's a pretty clean place and I'm not sick, so it must have been the altitude!

The schedule is almost exclusively work, but we made the most of one morning and went up to Poás Volcano.

The drive up was super nice:

The volcano is active, so we had to wear helmets.  The ground had big divots in the concrete where burning stuff had been spit onto it, and the metal railings were occasionally bent from rocks it flung.  I am sure the helmet would have prevented any harm from coming to me from such hurtling, blazing debris.

It was very nice:

The drive back was nice too -- we stopped at a roadside and looked at this waterfall:

I also ate a Mamon Chino from a roadside stand (the alien eggs in the picture below).  Pretty good -- much like a lychee.  The strawberries that grow near the volcano are supposed to be good too, but I didn't have any of those.

Pura Vida!