Food

The food here so far has been pretty good. I don´t have a kitchen to speak of (only a refrigerador and microwave) so I have been eating a variety of different things trying to figure out what will work. In the beginning I was eating out quite a bit and most of the restaurants serve the same for food for the most part. There are a couple OK Italian places and some Chinese places, which were not particularly good, a lot of typical Costa Rican food.

The staple Costa Rican meal is called "Casado" and consists of your choice of meats (chicken, beef, pork, fish), white rice, black beans and a vegetable. It is not necessarily very exciting but it usually is relatively flavorful and fills you up. It is always the best value of price/quantity so I´ve been eating this a lot. I do buy some groceries, mostly cereal and cookies, and also these little snack pastry things that you can get any breadstore. I´m starting to figure a relatively nutritious and cost effective diet.

The best aspect of food in Costa Rica is the fruit. It is cheap, plentiful and delicious. There all kinds of vendors selling mangos, pineapple, cantaloupe, guanaba and a bunch of other dilectable items around my office. Today I went and bought a piece of pineapple for $0.40 and it was perhaps the best tasting pineapple I´ve ever had. The other really fantastic thing here are these smoothie type drinks called "batidos." They´re really simple, fruit juice with milk and some sugar, but some how they make them taste so good. There´s nothing better than drinking one these on a hot, sunny day.