Always on your Guard

This is my umbrella that doubles as a weapon.
As you can see, a few wires hang down and one side
kind of tilts in! But hey, it's better than nothing!

            On Wednesday afternoon Amanda and I made our way back to the house so I could shower before our little Walmart excursion we had planned. Neither of us had tried opening our front doors before and it was a struggle to say the least. We have a front gate door that you have to open, a normal front door, and then an anterior door that are all dead bolted. I couldn’t figure out how to open all the doors so Amanda decided to try her luck at it. We were about 5 minutes into this process when we heard a man come up behind us. I was so alarmed that I couldn’t even understand what he had said. All I knew is that I had my umbrella and I was ready to attack. I turned around with umbrella in hand not knowing what to expect only to find our host dad standing there. He felt bad that I freaked out and I was a little embarrassed; however, better safe than sorry.

            I hopped in the shower really quick and 15 minutes later we were ready to go. I should probably warn you all that this was our second attempt at going to Walmart. The first time around we climbed on the wrong bus going in the opposite the direction of where we wanted to go and by the time we figured it out we didn’t have enough time to go before dinner. This time around we again received explicit directions from our host mom and headed towards what we thought was the correct bus station. We reached Plaza Cristal, climbed on a bus and were on our way. I was a little weary as we continued on our bus ride because I began to notice that we were heading in the same direction we went the last time we attempted to go to Walmart. Thirty minutes later, we ended up in the heart of downtown San Jose and were eventually told we had to get off because it was the last stop. We discovered that once again we had indeed climbed on the bus going in the opposite direction. We then spent another dollar and got on a bus heading back to the exact same spot we had started. At this point, it was rush hour and took double the time to get back to our starting point. We arrived back to our original spot around 5:30 and decided to head home because it would be a 30 minute walk and dinner was at 6 p.m. No worries, I have hope that someday we will see Costa Rica’s version of Walmart!