Last Day In San Jose

Our last day in San Jose was full of informative lectures. This morning our first guest speaker was Mr. Manuel. He said back in the day you would work with your family because there wasn’t any job opportunities available. A fun fact from his lecture is that Panama doesn’t speak English and it is not a bilingual country. He has four sons: All four are very successful and have a high education. This man is the definition of a proud parent. Their website name is Ticoshopping.com. Some of the company’s marketing strategies are don’t argue with customer, and use a lot of Facebook for advertising. After he mentioned that comment, I thought to get a better understanding of their advertising strategies I should visit the company’s Facebook page. I encourage everyone to go and like their page just to check out how neat it is. They actually do a great job and I am thinking of buying coffee from them when I get back to the states. The company’s best selling product is coffee if I forget to mention that by the way!

Ms. Lisa was our second guest speaker and she gave a presentation on The Costa Rica Economy of Today. A fun fact is Christopher Columbus discovered Costa Rica. An interesting fact from this lecture is San Jose is the fourth most livable city in Latin American, according to the Economist Survey. A survey was done and the outcome is Costa Rican’s are very happy people and on one survey they had this country coming out to be the happiest country in the world. We then ate lunch and had this yummy treat for dessert! 

Ms. Gayle with the Peach Corp. was our third guest speaker. Ms. Gayle works in the slums of Costa Rica talking to us about poverty in Costa Rica. She started off her presentation by making us think of poverty as a state or condition. She said,"imagine waking up and there’s no water to take a shower, drink water, or flush the toilet with. There is not steady source of water to drink." A fact about poverty in Costa Rica I did not know about is the male is not the bread winner there are no guys that stick around, women live in depression. Her first step when trying to better these poverty cities is by starting to educate the children, then building up to parents and so on.

Our fourth guest speaker was a Dean from the University of Costa Rica. He is a chemist, has a PHD, and can speak English and French. He said Pura Vida was a saying used by comedians years and years ago. Before coming on this trip we read a story called Monday and he was actually the author of that short novel. It was neat to see the smile on his face when we told him we read his work. 

Finally our last guest speaker of the day talked to us about Costa Rican’s African descendent culture. These decedents mostly are around the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. A brief cultural trend is the name of his presentation. Diquis Stone Spheres are stone balls that are known from archaeological sites and buried strata that have only pottery characteristics.

We finished the day by attending a local Jazz Cafe which reminds me of a House of Blues. The event was suppose to start at nine but because Costa Rican's live in "Tico Times" it didn't start until 9:50 PM. Even though I was pretty tired I enjoyed saying appetizers with Dr. Lanier and listening to Latin Pop music.