SAN JOSE (09/03/09 - 11/03/09)
San Jose is the first capital city that we have managed to look around. It is quite an unattractive city but the people are friendly and it has a less threatening feel than some of the other cities that we have visited.
Liz concentrating hard on a latte and brownie.
Costa Rica serves the best coffee that we have had. Here´s a delicious cup not ruined by milk or sugar (says Adam).
The old San Jose Fort. It has now been converted into the city museum since Costa Rica had the good sense to abolish it´s armed forces in 1948. In central American tradition they painted it a rather gaudy pastel yellow.
Inside the museum there were some examples of pre-Columbian art such as this grinning jaguar.
They also had some interesting gold artifacts, they are fairly unusual since the Spanish invaders melted down much of the gold.
The British Isles as shown on an old Spanish map. Rather annoyingly nothing in the museum had any dates on it so we have no idea exactly when it was made.
The old barrack latrines.
Some of the graffiti on the walls of the prison cells used to discipline the soldiers.
We next visited the museum of modern art. These fabric bananas were one of the few decent exhibits. However we are probably just philistines.
More local art.
The Jade Museum had thousands of pieces of carved jade such as this frog.
They also had some good stone sculpture. This is the head of a macaw.
This fearsome jaguar looks too cheerful to be really scary.
These ceremonial carvings were also used for grinding grains and seeds. The jaguar and macaw heads above are also attatched to similar objects.
This genuine human jaw bone shows clearly the traditional decorative tooth filing that was common several hundred years ago in the area.
The indiginous people loved decoration and seemed to put great effort into almost everything they made. This clay pot looks incredibly miserable.
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