Day 6 (In Which After the Consumption of Rum, Nancy and I Debate Which of our Friends should get the Bottle Opener with a Wooden Penis Shaped Handle)

Day 6 (In Which After the Consumption of Rum, Nancy and I Debate Which of our Friends should get the Bottle Opener with the Wooden Penis Shaped Handle)

After two days of road trips, we planned a day of rest, although sleeping in was never really a choice. We rode into Coco again and found a different Soda to eat breakfast at. We sat on the porch with several other dining couples. We could tell something was wrong since there seemed to be only two people and a 2 year old behind the counter. After a long wait, the owner, an American expat came out and confessed that neither the cook nor the babysitter showed up for work, but he was working on making us some breakfast.

When the food arrived it was fantastic, but the guava jelly that came with it made the sun shine brighter and the iguanas in the tree wink and smile. When the morning rush died down the owner told us stories of moving to this beach 40 years ago when it was a hippie commune. He also took us back into his office to look at pictures of his gnome.

A Swedish advertising company had brought two garden gnomes to Costa Rica to shoot a magazine advertisement. He hosted the company and helped the secure locations for their photo shoot. As a reward, he got to keep one of the gnomes.

After breakfast we wandered down to the souvenir shops where we learned that Costa Rica is not exempt from the first Universal Law of Tourist Areas. “If an item is popular in one souvenir store, you will find the exact same thing in every souvenir store in the city.” We saw every color and size of strokable wooden frog imaginable. Duplicates of wooden bowls, masks, puzzle boxes, and coasters were in every store.

The second Universal of Law of Tourist Areas states that “Every T-shirt shop should have at least one shirt showing a local animal, one with a joke about drinking beer, one with a Christian message, and one with Marijuana leaves.” The exact ratio can vary by site, but all of the groups have to be represented and intermixed. Again, in this respect, we were not disappointed.

We saw many of the same items we had seen at the roadside stands marked up 30-40%. We also noticed that the prices in town were in dollars, not colones, a sure sign that you are getting gouged even further since change is always in colones and can vary from 520-1 to 480-1.

We bought a few knick knacks for friends and were heading back to the car, when I found, placed among the wooden crocodiles and brightly painted yo-yos, a bottle opener with a wooden handle lovingly carved to resemble a giant penis. It was $10 which seemed a bit steep for an item that, while being fully functional and hysterical is not something you are going to leave in the drawer next to the can opener and the little sharpened handles that you stick into corn on the cob so you don’t get your hand messy.

As discreetly as I could, I tried to get Nancy’s attention by yelling her name and waving it over my head. She asked me who I intended to by that for, and under that sort of pressure I was stumped. (I already have a “Sea World” bottle opener that works just fine, so I did not need it.)

It was only later after Nancy and I were drinking rum mixed with tropical fruit juice that Nancy came up with the ideal recipient for such a prize. (I won’t tell who since Christmas is right around the corner.)

Most of the day was spent climbing on the volcanic rock formations at the beach, lazing by the pool, and eating chocolate and orange ice cream while watching the afternoon thunderstorms.

After dinner at the Asian-fusion-tapas restaurant down the street, Nancy and Isaac went to bed, and I wandered up to the pool area because Wednesday was movie and karaoke night in the open air dance hall. By the time I showed up, the movie was almost over which was okay because it was “An Inconvenient Truth” dubbed in Spanish. Somehow they found a voice actor to recreate the excitement in Al Gore’s voice in Spanish.

Our neighbors were there with their kids. The younger had fallen asleep, the older was playing his DS. When the time came for karaoke, I was excited. I knew that the crowd would be dazzled, by my mastery of the Johnny Cash canon, but when I looked through the list, 99% of the songs were in Spanish. The English ones were an odd collection including songs by Metallica and “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a difficult one to pull off by oneself. I finally settled on “Don’t Be Cruel” and did “Kokomo” as an encore. In between I sat through half a dozen cheesy love ballads in Spanish which actually sounded pretty good after a round of 2 for 1 Imperials with my neighbor David.

The crowd seemed appreciative of my effort and after taking my bow went back to room 411 to get some rest for the next day’s adventure.

Strength and Honor.
Big Matt