The Market

The Market - Ben Donaldson

The second day here in Costa Rica, the plan is to go to a gold museum and then go shopping at the San Jose. We get to the gold museum, and it has these insane hardcore guards walking around with sawed-off shotguns strapped to their backs and the gates had locks consisting of retina scans, fingerprint scans, voice recognition and everywhere we looked were vaults of 2 ft. thick steel with laser gates that would saw off your leg like a light saber…so we decide maybe we should spend no more than an hour in this museum…of death. Everyone makes it out okay, except for this poor, poor, girl named Alexis Johnson. The story is too gruesome to recollect, so I'll move on. We get done mourning Alexis's fate and decide it's time to do some shopping! Woot! We get to the market and find out that this so-called “market” is actually a warehouse with stands EVERYWHERE creating tiny three-foot wide pathways that weaved around through this place. The stands consisted of souvenir stands, meat vendors, counterfeit backpack makers (Katie and Jacqueline actually found one with “Dansport” instead of “Jansport” and bought it for Katie's boo, Dan), knife makers, glass blowers, hit man hiring booths, places to hire the guards from the gold museum, and a hello kitty/my little pony stand overflowing with rainbows and happiness. Oh yeah, one had to watch where one stepped in the place because there would randomly be traps such as blow darts, endless pits, and saws coming out from the walls that were triggered by stepping on a small switch on the ground. Our entire group made it through this market alive and we travel back to our hotel and on the way, a flock of pigeons attack us and force us to run the boiling hot 4 miles back to our hotel, uphill both ways. Then Alexis came back to life (?) and she, Libby, Liam, Brooke, Janelle, and I went and got some Pizza Hut. Oh P.S. the food down here is absolutely amazing along with the coffee, candy, and everything else. Basically we are all having an amazing time on this ten-day adventure into a foreign land.

-Ben'