On the list of topics for a possible first blog entry about arriving in Costa Rica, Schlotsky's Deli did not make the Top 10. Yet as we deplaned at Juan Santamaría Airport, the first thing we ran into was a Schlotzky's Deli cart, replete not only with sandwiches but a faux-mural of a Latin American man putting bread into a large brick oven, as if Diego Rivera had sold out and been hired to graphically brand the competitor to Subway and Quizno. Of course, we saw perhaps three Subways and one Quizno on the drive from the airport to La Amistad, our b&b near downtown San José. Heck, we hadn't made as far as customs control before we had passed two Burger Kings and a Papa John's. Once on the road, we discovered that Denny's appear as commonplace in San José as Waffle Houses are in Georgia, and if you're wondering where all the KFCs went, apparently, the colonel's beloved franchise now stands for Kosta Rican Fried Chicken.
Flight 245 from Atlanta to San José foreshadowed our arrival in this local outpost of McWorld, filled as it was with a very large Methodist mission group from Radford, Virginia; students and teachers from a Friends middle school in Baltimore; and, well, us. Who was missing from our flight? By and large, los ticos -- that is, what Costa Ricans call themselves -- appeared few and far between, and the few ticos arriving at Juan Santamaría sped past the chain restaurants and through the one line for costariqueños at custom, while we waited in a far, far longer line to go through any of the four checkpoints for visitors. Clearly, for los gringos, it will take a lot of effort to see Costa Rica above and beyond the tourist economy -- which, after all, has supplanted the historic coffee and banana economies as the key to the nation's prosperity.
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