How do you say "sushi" in Spanish?
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2007
1
9
11
Trip End
Jan 17, 2007
San Jose,
Costa Rica
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
I went back to get Sarah so we could go on a search for breakfast. After a stroll around town, hitting three banks (problems with Banco Nacional again), two bakeries, and a fruit store, we'd seen enough of Nicoya. It was more pleasant than expected, and larger, but there was really nothing major to see or do. We ate our breakfast in the park, where Sarah got hit up by a vagrant for her spare change, and applauded by a mother across the walk when she saw Sarah wasn't giving it to him. (Her little girl, on the other hand, was completely confused, because it seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to her.) When we had finished breakfast, we went back to the hotel, where the clerk asked if we had been planning to leave at all today.
So we gathered up our stuff, and went down to catch the bus. Which, oddly enough, arrived and departed pretty close to on-time. The trip was about an hour less than we had been expecting, at only four and a half hours instead of six. It also stopped a couple of hours into the trip for a bathroom and food break, at some rest stop-like place in the middle of nowhere. In San Jose, we caught a taxi back to the same hostel we'd stayed in before, Kabata Hostel, and dropped off our bags before we went back out to try and finish our souvenir shopping and have dinner.
Since it's usually pretty interesting to see what sushi is like in other countries, we went on a hunt for the sushi restaurant that was supposedly right near our hostel. After walking up and down the same block several times and not seeing anything, I stopped in to ask directions at a Quiznos. Only to realize that neither one of us remembered the full name of the restaurant, nor did we know the word for "sushi" in Spanish. (Just a hint: Don't try asking for the place where they sell raw fish, as I did, as you will obviously be pointed to the grocery store.) Going by memory to find the other seafood place I remembered from the book, we came upon an Ichiban. (Though we never actually saw the other seafood place.) Walking in, we were greeted enthusiastically by folks speaking Japanese with such a strong Spanish accent, I had no idea what they were saying at first, despite a semester of Japanese. And greetings, the weather, and farewells in varying levels of politeness are really all you do in first semester Japanese. Thankfully, they went back to Spanish after that. Maybe it's a chain thing.
Another thing we've found that we'd not considered in advance - reading sushi menus in foreign countries is puzzling at best, and we usually end up with at least one item that we stare at and kind of poke before we sample it. This time we got off relatively light - I managed to order some sort of sushi rolls that were coated in American cheese, which is something that one should just not do.
After finishing dinner about eight pm, we went back out to visit the huge city mall near us to see if there were any souvenir stands we could get goodies from. Turns out the mall was closing, and unless we wanted to watch a movie or get a perm, there was nothing for us there. So we went to the outlet mall across the street. Where we ran into the same problem. As everything even remotely near us was closed, and we'd learned about walking in San Jose too late last time we were here, we went back to the hostel. The lady assured us the malls had just closed up early for some reason, and this wasn't normal, but that didn't really help us any.
With nothing much to do, we played on the internet and tried out my Skype account, accidentally calling Uruguay, before going up to bed, to wake up at 5 a.m. Ugh.
