San José is the capital of Costa Rica. With 340,000 habitats it's the biggest city in the country. It's located in the Central Valley between two mountain chains at 1,170 m above sea level. Every guidebook will tell you that the city is not very beautiful and in parts I must agree with that... You have to search a bit to find the nice places =)
The national theater is one of these nice places:
Especially in the higher class neighbourhoods the houses appear a bit like jails. All the houses are surrounded by high fences and barbed wire (Stacheldraht). Also all the windows are barred. These houses are still fairly "unsafe":
Above the streets swing tones of electricity cables, but if you look behind them the view can be really
stunning! San José is surrounded by beautiful mountains.
The streets are a bit adventurous and the strongest has all the rights... so as a pedestrian (Fußgänger) better watch out and double check before crossing the street ;-) Oh but don't trust the direction indicators (Blinker), because they are forgotten regularly. The drivers here communicate by beeping the horn. After a while I got used to all of this and started enjoying the chaos with fruit stands on every corner and a mixture of big, new 4x4 wheel drives and rusted, old jalopies (Klapperkisten).
On the streets of San José you can see easily that Costa Rica is a developing country with some parts already very developed and others still very little developed. On the one hand the price level is nearly as high as in Europe, they have a very good health care and educational system, but on the other hand the salaries are very low and poverty is still a very big problem.
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