Street Art

On our very first day in San Jose last November, we noticed a small group of street artists painting a mural of the face of Bob Marley on the corner not far from where we live. Since that day, we have both loved discovering the murals and creative graffiti all over the city.

I’ve wondered if permission must be obtained.  Is it legal or illegal….no one seems to know for sure?

Perhaps I haven’t yet met the right people to ask?? At any rate, the artwork does exist everywhere.

The styles, the themes, the colors are widely varied.

One might even speculate about how many pieces of street art could be self-portraits in addition to political and social statements.

I have read that one of the most rewarding factors of street art is the surface. Some may say the cold metal of train cars cannot be beat for a good surface. But then there is also shabby siding, dilapidated brick, heavily textured stucco and of course….concrete.

 The essence of street art is often anonymous to the casual passerby, unless you take the time to decipher it – when possible – and study it. How long did a piece take? How many artists worked on it? And when you see a pile of spray paint cans tossed to the side – next to a scribble which may or may not be the artist’s signature – why? Who paid for the cans?  In most cases, no money was to be made from this.

In researching the street artists work, my favorite quote I found was ….”Whatever their reasons – they’re just doing their job, after all.”

San Jose Birds on Parade

So.... we got up at 3:15 am in Denver for a 6:00 am flight back to Costa Rica after a wonderful visit with family in Colorado.
Twelve hours later in the cab on the way back to the apartment we thought  something new had appeared on some of the streets and parks in San Jose……..We thought we saw colorful decorated fiberglass bird sculptures.
After a good nights sleep we were delighted to see they were not a result of fatigue, but indeed real.
When I started to do some research, much to my dismay, the whole official website was in Spanish with no translation.
The only way for me to translate was to type the text in Spanish on my much used Bing Espanol/Ingles translation website.  Please remember those of you who know me---I am a one-handed, have to look at the keyboard typist!  This should be yet another hint to us that we need to hurry up and find a language class…
The event is called the Peace Parade.  Costa Rica is the only country in the world that has more than 60 years of living without an army.  
The Peace Parade is organized by two private business organizations with the support of the city of San Jose.
The event was born to promote and celebrate the message of peace to the people of Costa Rica and the world.  Businesses and/or individuals sponsor one or more of the birds that are exhibited in main parks, boulevards and sidewalks all around San Jose (a cosmopolitan city where nearly half the population of Costa Rica passes daily).
There was a call for schools and artists across the country to submit their proposals for deigns….. 50 proposals from schools and 20 from artists were accepted to be displayed from the applicants.
These wonderful birds were installed December 15 and will remain in place until March 25 this year.

Though it was impossible to pick any favorite, these are a few examples. Some are just artistic tropical colorful designs, while some seem to have subtle underlying messages concerning politics or ecology.

The website is peaceparade.com if you would like to check it out.

From this exhibition to the exciting street art and murals to traditional and contemporary sculpture, public art it plentiful and so much fun to discover. Watch for future posts for information and pictures of more public art around the San Jose area.

Christmas in San Jose, Costa Rica 2011

The sights of Christmas in downtown San Jose are quite beautiful this year!

The big constructed light tree is in the park in front of the National Museum of Costa Rica just down the hill from us.

The hanging lights line the streets in the downtown area.

The day we ventured downtown to do some shopping the weather was beautiful. The spirit of the holiday shopping crowds seem to be the same whether we are in San Jose or Charlotte or Denver. (not to mention the number of people!)

We are currently back in the US to spend Christmas with Colorado family and loving every minute of it.

We will return to CR New Years Eve...

We want to wish all of you a wonderful and blessed holiday season.

More from CR later.



Off To The Market

The Saturday Farmers Markets in Costa Rica are like a wonderful color wheel of exotic as well as more ordinary fruits and vegetables......

Families, couples, restaurants, locals and visitors bring bags, boxes and all sizes and configurations of carts to do the weekly shopping for quality fresh foods for the week from the huge number of vendors.

We were in great company yesterday with our Costa Rican friend Rafa.We headed out in the morning to catch the bus to Guadalupe, the closest market to where we are in San Jose.

While we are getting ever so slightly better with the whole money thing, the issue with us now is not in asking the price of something we wish to purchase.The big problem lies in understanding the answer.
Rafa was great helping us understand the prices of what we were buying not to mention explaining about some of the totally unfamiliar fruits and vegetables.

I asked him if he would mind asking the price of some avocados that I thought looked really good. The young man selling the produce kindly cut off a small sample of the avocado and gave it to him to try. He had a strange look on his face as he sampled the avocado...When I asked if it was good, he smiled and said, "I don't really care for avocado". What a nice friend...

On the way back to catch the bus, we stopped at a little cafe for the best yet (for me) Costa Rican tamale and coffee. Maybe we could find the little cafe again??

Though we were tempted to buy one of everything, we got home with pineapples, avocados, bananas, and cilantro... all the freshest you can imagine . Hard not to overdo with the amazing quality and very inexpensive prices.

One More Thing

Okay so..the monkey video of mommy and baby was so cute we really need to share it..

And The Rest Of The Story

Suffice it to say........ the rest of the time spent on vacation with our kids was memorable! A few of the highlights were: The educational and informative and really fun tour of the Cafe Britt Coffe Plantation--who knew coffee had such an interesting history!!! The Lodge where we spent the night near the Poas Volcano. (the clouds prevented us from seeing the volcano, but the lodge (and great food) was worth the drive up the mountain. Manuel Antonio...the hike in the jungle, the monkeys outside our balcony and the amazingly beautiful beach. The resort in Punteranas (our Christmas present from our daughter and son in law)...lots of great food and  just some relaxing beach time! Melynda and Brent have already been missing the fresh fruit and breakfast beer..... The wonderful boat trip to and from the beach on Tortuga Island (and the great food) . Melynda and Brent reluctantly left Monday to go back home to Denver to their cats, their jobs and snow. We are back in San Jose in our little apartment in the big city. Back to learning more about life in Costa Rica and it's people. Back to learning how to find our way around. The language is beginning to sound a bit more familiar even if we still don't know what people are saying to us a good part of the time .We both see beginning Spanish classes  in our not too distant future. Last night was our first attempt at making  Gallo Pinto (the staple food for all Costa Ricans). It was very good, but we are not quite ready to have our Costa Rican neighbor test it yet... Tomorrow we are looking forward to attending (not yet participating) an art show in Escazu---will report on that later. Following are some recent pictures. Our friends outside our windows A very slow moving sloth!            Connie & Michael on Torguga Island

Brent & Melynda out on the pier

                                                                                            

Our trip with the kids

Hey Amigos!

Our plan was to wait to post again until we were back in San Jose after traveling to several different areas in CR with Brent and Melynda.

It seems, however, there are too many pictures and experiences to include in just one post.

We will start with our one day trip to San Gerardo De Dota with the intent to venture into the cloud forest in search of birds with Brents new binoculars.

To set the scene for the following videos, we were delighted that the GPS on Brent's phone could actually find where we were and keep us on course.........we thought.

It seems we got a little off course, but Google maps found us an alternate route.

I cannot even do justice trying to describe the road on which we found ourselves traveling but thank the Lord for 4 wheel drive! 

Meanwhile, the GPS continued to tell us we were right on the alternate course.

The following video clips that Melynda took do a better job telling the story of this trip.............

By the way, we did finally reach our destination, but the visit was cut short by the rains of the day.

And we are relieved to report that we did get back to San Jose by way of the "road more traveled."

more to come shortly.....................