Today is the Festival de La Luz: the Christmas Parade that goes through downtown San Jose, culminating in a concert and fireworks till all hours of the night. Some of the other guests from the ship who were traveling with us by bus back to the city from Puerto Caldera said they were going to avoid the city-especially in late afternoon when the parade was to start….we got carried away with our visit and forgot the time.
It was wonderful! Albeit crowded. The parade had marching bands and dancing girls and the same type of large puppets we had seen in Granada in Nicaragua, marching down the street and bending over to kiss the girls close to the edge of the street. The Festival de La Luz includes dancing and musical groups from all the country. Groups are prized for the best costumes, the best dancers and the best orchestra. The "Festival de la Luz" is a Light Festival, and takes place at night. Floats with colorful lights and decorative design run all over the two main streets at San Jose.
On the way into the city, we saw the floats parked along the highway and in driveways, waiting for the parade to begin. This appeared to be a Central American version of the Rose Parade!! The folk dancers were reminiscent of those who had entertained us on the ship-but in more colorful costumes. We were surrounded by an important cultural event and got a taste of tradition that we might have felt was gone otherwise.
For as we walked through the city, most of what we saw were low-end shops selling toys, shoes, electronics, and dresses. The young people were dressed much like they would be any where in the world. We traversed Central Avenida-the main street and it was closed to vehicular traffic serving as a pedestrian mall that was teeming with people (and apparently is so every weekend).
By contrast, we visited the National Museum of Costa Rica and it was very quiet with possibly 6-10 other visitors. It was a lovely old building that had once been residential, then became a military headquarters and, when the Army was abandoned, it became a museum. It was quite interesting as it took a look at Costa Rica from the earliest times of primitive man to the present and looked with a concerned eye at the future. While much of the history seemed similar to other indigenous peoples of the Americas (arrowheads, thatched roof cottages) there were some exceptions. The earliest dwellings had ceramic floors! Some of the ancient furnishings included beautiful tables carved out of a single piece of volcanic rock (see below) Like other indigenous peoples, there was a spirituality that connected humans with animals and attributed souls to inanimate as well as animate objects.
Ancient musical instruments
We had noticed that the people seemed pretty homogeneous. However, one display suggested that Costa Ricans included indigenous tribes (7) along with blacks who immigrated from the Caribbean islands, Chinese who came to work on the railroads, eastern Europeans who fled persecution along with the well documented early Spaniards searching for gold and spices, most infamously Christopher Columbus.
We are staying in the suburbs and when we decided to try to return to the hotel, we realized that the city was pretty well closed to traffic and finding a cab was difficult. Finally we found one and he was reluctant to try to get to our hotel since the main road was closed down. But when we agreed to a price twice what it normally would be, he agreed. He deftly negotiated the back roads to get us to the hotel quickly. We decided to forego dinner since we had a late lunch (turns out it was next door to a notorious house of “ill repute.”). So we decided to go to the mall across the street for a cup of coffee and to see what it was like. Well, we could have been in any city in the US with the stores we find in most upscale malls! When we stopped for our coffee, we noticed that the parade was on TV and that the crowds had grown and the floats and bands had become much more elaborate. It’s 9:30 PM and it is still going on! We saw the firework finale on the television.
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