Day 15, Saturday May 24, 2008

I start walking to the bus station, with all my luggage bouncing pathetically all over the road behind me, that was incredibly difficult by the way, a half hour before my bus was supposed to leave. But a van taxi drove by and the guy felt really bad for me so he gave me a ride to the bus station, free of charge. Really nice guy. I wish I had had some money to give him, but I was still fucking broke.
Anyway so I get to the bus stop and wait a few minutes for Alysha, she finally shows up in a taxi, and we try to figure out what bus we’re on. I point to an orange one that drives up, but we don’t think that’s the right one, but the time is almost there for the bus to leave so I run over to check that bus, and it starts driving away. So I start running down the street after it before someone stops me and tells me that it will be back after it gets back from Manuel Antonio in about 20 minutes. So I go back and tell Alysha and we start to panic a little, but go stand with the people that told me that, since they are going on that bus too with their entire luggage. Probably going to the airport like we are.
So we finally get on the bus and get settled, we’re the last ones on and we tell him we’re going to the airport. It looks like everyone is. So we bust out our ipods on the bus since it is a three hour drive. We make one stop to pee at this really ghetto place that we had been warned about (this was our ONLY warning about the entire bus ride btw, Buddy didn’t help us one bit about anything, we were a lot nicer to those coming after us). Anyway, so the place is really grungy and apparently people really like to steal there, so we take all our shit with us just to pee, and then we get back on the bus and get on the way to San Jose. The view is great again, but we’re tired and anxious to get on the plane, since we’re worried about getting on in time and all.
We start to get to San Jose and get to an airport, but it says “Domestic terminal” above the stop, so we assume, since nobody else is getting off either (nobody) and the bus driver doesn’t say anything to us, that there must be an international terminal. We sit there and the bus drives away from the airport. Like 10 minutes later, after I’d seen a US Airways plane on a runway, I start to think we’re heading in the right direction, and the girls behind us are talking about it too, so we’re sure we’re going in the right direction, though I’m starting to get really tense. We get to downtown San Jose. Things get chaotic. Everyone is kicked off of the bus, and the Wisconsin girls that had been “helping us” start freaking out a bit too as we’re kicked off and the bus parks.
We walk at least ten blocks through downtown San Jose (which is kind of like a really grungy poor New York City I think, since it is just crowded to the max and very busy) while we’re lugging our luggage behind us. I start regretting getting that second piece of luggage pretty quick as I am having a really hard time and those girls aren’t waiting for us. Thankfully they spoke pretty good Spanish so they were able to talk to people and find out how to get to the new bus station. We finally got on a bus after a lot of confusion of whether it actually went to the airport and whether it had enough room for us. They let us cut a few people in line so that we could get on.
The bus started and a guy next to Alysha told her that the bus would make it to the airport in half an hour at best…. We had 50 minutes before the plane took off, and we still had to go through security and all that shit. We started to panic. And it just got worse and worse as the bus made its stops whenever someone pulled the string.
We were almost crying by the time we got to the airport, which was the one we stopped at before… people practically pushed us off this time.
We ran up to the airport and some guy took all of our stuff and put it on a luggage carrier and lead us to the Continental gate. Except that nobody was there. The gate was closed. We started to panic again and he lead us to the Continental office, where they told us that we had to be there an hour before for check in and that we missed it by half an hour. They could not let us get on the plane. Alysha was crying and I was leaving really angry voicemails with my parents since they weren’t answering their fucking phones. Continental’s people, seeing how upset we were, let us have tickets for the next day’s flight at the exact same time for no charge. So we got in a taxi and went to the hotel the Continental people recommended. $160/night. Fuck that. The taxi driver helped us a lot and brought us to a few other hotels until he was sure that we were satisfied. He only asked for $20 too, which was a lot better than the prices in Quepos and Manuel Antonio. He was a great guy, pretty funny too.
Anyway, so we get our hotel and check it out thinking it would be bigger than it was, though we got the smallest room available. It was very very small. One pretty small bed that we had to share, and a small room, with a giant bathroom and shower. Odd. We didn’t mind. We hit the restaurant and started drinking. We needed a drink. And then we bitched about Buddy and the trip and decided how to let the others know so that they wouldn’t have the same problems we did.
She fells asleep that night on my shoulder as I watched the Celtics-Pistons game. She snored, though not loudly, it was actually cute, and woke up and was horrified that she snored until I convinced her that it was really just cute rather than annoying or whatever. Then she finally went to sleep again after the movie she suggested to watch ended.