Top 10 Costa Rica

Considered the most important holiday in the Catholic calendar, Easter in Costa Rica is a time for religious traditions as families gather to share their faith and time together. Many of the Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica travel north to be with their family back home, and people from the city go to visit their extended family in the country.

Most Costa Ricans go home to celebrate their town’s patron saint with bullfights, rodeos, dancing, parades and fireworks, while nearly a million Costa Ricans decide to take advantage of their time off work to head to the coast. In fact, the entire city of San Jose is usually dead as everyone leaves to the beach or to be with family.

Those who do decide to stay may choose to attend two of the most important processions where the journey of Jesus to where he is crucified on the cross is depicted in a dramatization with live human actors, instead of the effigy of Christ that is generally held at the front of a procession. One of the most dramatic ones is in Tres Rios, in Cartago. Teletica broadcasts another one in San Joaquin de Flores in Heredia.

The processions come complete with Roman [actors] performing flagullation, and a representation of every person that was at the scene of Christ’s death. Many people come to line the streets and watch, while in smaller towns, you can join the procession and pick up snacks from street vendors along the way.

Liquor, however, is not for sale starting midnight on Ash Wednesday (which falls on March 19 this year) through midnight on Good Friday (March 21). Don’t feel like an alcoholic if you immediately consider stocking up in advance – the whole country does it! Some bars can still be found selling alcohol illegally, which is more common in touristy beach destinations, so don’t fear too much.

What you won’t find lacking is seafood and seafood advertisements, which is sold in bulk days before Easter, as many religious followers do not eat meat on Good Friday or throughout the week. Chicha, a hot drink made from aguadulce, ginger and cinnamon (other combinations exist) which burns as it goes down, is traditionally drunk around Easter time in many regions.

Costa Rica’s suicide shower.

Some areas of the world have particular things that define them, and although a good idea they are only found in one continent or region and nowhere else. This even applies to electrical appliances and for Central and South America one of the defining bathroom fixtures is the Suicide Shower. I was first told about them by some American friends in London who told me to watch out for a contraption that fits over the shower head and is plugged into the electric mains. Pretty scary until you get used to them, I was told.

The idea behind suicide showers is to provide hot water where the plumbing system does not run to a hot water boiler, which is the norm in most of tropical America. The water is heated inside the shower head and usually provides a constant and dependable stream of hot water. Getting the stream of water right is something of an art that comes with practice, if the water flow is low it will come out boiling hot, to high and it’s only lukewarm. Controlling the flow to the optimum level can take some time and in some hotels there are detailed instructions on the back of the bathroom door.

Of course the really scary thing about suicide showers is that they combine that lethal combination of water and electricity. They need a lot of power in order to work and so are wired straight into the mains; you know they are working because when you turn on the water all the lights go dim. You can buy one of these things in any hardware store and simply wire it up yourself using a few bits of insulation tape. Some of the bodge jobs I’ve seen have been truly terrifying, like you really feel you are taking your life in your hands. Do I really want to be clean that much? Sometimes when you turn the water up too quickly an electric blue flash of comes out of the side of the shower head and you really feel - this is it. One of the guide books says that they are perfectly safe as long as you don’t fiddle with them and I have only experience a mild shock off one, so this does seem to be true.

Of course some suicide showers are better than others, with most of the best made in Brazil. South of the tropic and the Rio/San Paulo area they are no longer found as its cold enough in winter here for hotels to install real heating and hot water systems. As I am leaving Central America soon it is farewell to the suicide shower, a part of the Latin experience.

Two-year-old twin girls that were formerly conjoined at the chest and abdomen are back at home in Costa Rica.

Yurelia and Fiorella Rocha-Arias were separated by surgery at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford in November and flew back home today.

The girls arrived in the Bay Area in July and began receiving weekly injections of sterile salt water into balloons placed under their skin. The procedure stretched the skin to compensate for the holes surgeons cut into their abdomens.

After the separation surgery, Yurelia needed follow-up heart surgery to correct some deformities. After the operations, her heart started to function normally.

Researchers estimate the incidence of conjoined twins to be between 1 in 30,000 to 1 in 200,000 worldwide.

Colombia and Costa Rica are among the top ten nations in a ranking of excellence in environmental performance.

The 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), conducted by US universities Yale and Columbia, was announced last week (23 January) at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Costa Rica was ranked fifth and Colombia ninth, behind the top ranking nations Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. In the first EPI, conducted in 2006, Costa Rica was ranked fifteenth and Colombia seventeenth.

“Ranking ninth amongst 149 countries around the world and second in America after Costa Rica is a great achievement for Colombia,” says Marta Pizano, a Colombian biologist who last year received the Best of the Best prize from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“The EPI ranking reflects a strong policy network already in place [in Colombia], as well as a high level of awareness towards these very important issues,” she adds.

The EPI looks at success in environmental protection based on two broad objectives: reducing environmental stress on human health, and promoting strong ecosystems and sound natural resource management.

The index measures 25 indicators in six different areas: environmental health, air pollution, water, productive natural resources, biodiversity and habitat, and climate change.

Costa Rica came out best in several categories, including tackling air pollution, water stress, irrigation stress and land-burning, and improving forestry.

It also scored well in reducing industrial carbon intensity, aiming for low carbon growth in industrial sectors by investing in energy conservation and clean technologies, and making other policy changes to help lower carbon emissions.

Colombia performed particularly well in forestry, fisheries, cropland use and reducing local ozone — or ground level ozone, a pollutant from human activities that causes significant health problems.

According to Jorge Sánchez, national coordinator of the Ozone Technical Unit at the Environmental Ministry in Colombia, improved performance in the ozone category was the major reason for Colombia’s rise in the rankings.
Colombia reduced the national consumption of ozone depleting substances, such as chlorofluorocarbons in appliances like freezers, by 86 per cent between 1995 and 2007, says Sánchez.