Kinda crappy

Sooooo... San Jose is kinda crappy.  If you ever come here just do what we are doing and only spend about a day or skip it all together if you can.  The main "attractions" are the theater (picture at right, supposedly the inside is really nice but it was Sunday so... closed), bank, and post office.  Weeeee!  Lots of shoe stores which all have the same shoes, but they're pretty cheap (may be cheaply made as well, though).  Pretty dirty and crowded overall.  After our walking around downtown we hopped in a cab to try to find this restaurant called La Granja the hotel recommended.  We couldn't find much about it online so it must have been pretty small, and the cab driver couldn't find it either.  It was pretty funny trying to explain in Spanish what I could remember about where it was.  Anyway, after some driving around, which didn't really matter because cabs are dirt cheap here, we finally asked him for his recommendation for "comida buena". 

He dropped us at at a place called Restaurante Churrascaria Fogo Brasil.  It looked pretty nice and I thought I recognized the name from when I was looking through reviews on trip advisor for dinner places.  It was a Brazilian-style steakhouse where they come around and cut meat right off a skewer onto your plate and you can eat as much as you want (see pic at left, I didn't take it, but just wanted to show how the steak is served).  It also had an all you can eat buffet with all kinds of good sides like shrimp, beans, rice, salad, bread, cheese, and even sushi.  We were thinking, "Wow this is a good deal for only $8 like the guy said."  Yeah turns out he kinda mumbled $38 so we had our first expensive meal.  Also turns out this was one of the nicest and most expensive restaurants in all of Costa Rica; not to say the food wasn't excellent.  The wine was awesome, Malbec from Argentina; the desserts were unbelieveable, 60% pure chocolate brownie cake; this weird brazilian blender passion fruit milkshake kinda thing we had was so good; and the service was really great too.  Obviously we ate a ton and in the US this meal would have been like $200 with drinks, dessert, wine, dinner, tax, tip.  We paid about $120 after everything.  Still sucks, but man what a dinner.  Guess we better check the menu a little closer next time...  At least the cab ride home was only $1  :O)