¡Pura Vida!

¡Pura Vida! is the "shalom" of costa rica. It means just about everything and most conversations start and end with "¡esta bien, pura vida!" It answers most questions so if you dont know the answer - you can always safely respnd with ¡pura vida!.

Another interesting/funny things about costa rica is that absolutely no one follows any traffic laws. For stop signs, no one stops, instead they just honk their horns really loudly and speed up. It is totally normal to just narrowly miss running over bikers or pedestrians. One of the "moms" of one of the kids in my group got i a moter bike accident just yeaterday with a car. She was fine, but its not uncommon to see people sittingon the side of the road next to they smashed up bike or motercycle. On the way to Turriabla, we drove through what they call the "traffic circle of death" because it has no traffic signs or stop lights, its every car for itself. There are some huge number of accidents there each year.

One more random but interesting fact- the mail system. It is really interesting because no one has addresses. You live in a neighborhood, and your address is something like " 6km noth of the the tienda de ropa." So as you can imgaine this makes it difficult to deliver mail when everyone in the same neighborhood has the same address. So when the mailman want to deliever mail, he stands at the end of the street and shouts out names of the people with mail! how weird right!