When I was planning my trip to Costa Rica, a friend advised me to avoid staying in San Jose. I love sprawling cities, so I pushed him on his reasoning. “Because it’s Central America’s answer to Wolverhampton!” he said.
For those not familiar with English geography, Wolverhampton is a city in the West Midlands, notorious for traffic gridlock and an excessive zeal for concrete. Or so some people say. Is the city’s reputation deserved? I don’t know – I’ve only visited briefly to watch a couple of football games at the city’s Molineux stadium.
According to Wikipedia: “The demonym for people from the city is ‘Wulfrunian‘”. Wulfrunian?! To me, this sounds more like an incidental character from Game of Thrones, one of those introduced early in an episode and slaughtered before its end. A name implying a love of wattle and daub as construction materials, not concrete.
I’m digressing I know, but stay with me. I have a friend from Wolverhampton. At university he fell out of love with his course and spent his evenings learning to play the guitar rather than studying. In fact, he learnt to play one song: Cat Steven’s Moon Shadow – I listened to it on repeat, in sections, a hundred times … I can’t listen to that song ever again. When he sat his first exam, he did no more than scrawl Each Failure Is a Stepping Stone To Success on the exam paper and then headed for the pub. This particular failure wasn’t a stepping stone to success in this exam, but you get the idea – don’t mess with Wulfrunians. He came back and smashed it the following year.
If Wolverhampton can produce such self confidence, I should give its Central American cousin a chance to prove its worth.
So I stayed 2 nights in San Jose, giving me a full day to explore. It was the weekend and my expectations of traffic-clogged streets, exhaust fumes and hollering horns, proved inaccurate. On Sunday morning, a weirdly quiet and almost deserted city greeted me. But slowly, it revealed its charms: the Teatro Nacional, like a building plucked from Madrid and plonked down in the heart of the city; the Pre-Columbia Gold Museum (which also housed a fascinating contemporary art exhibit); and the pretty Barrio Escalante where I ate a wonderful lunch of chorizo salad and drank enough refreshing craft beer to make the rest of my explorations slower paced.
The one attraction I wasn’t able to see in its full glory, as it’s closed on Sundays, was the usually bustling Central Market. The plus side being all the stores had their shutters down revealing this fabulous selection of graffiti.
Te Amos Wolverhampton.
And if you can’t sift through everything, how do you know you’re getting to the good stuff, the stuff that will allow to write more compelling books and sell more of them?
I spotted the graffiti on the side of several derelict stores fronted by drifts of detritus and cardboard boxes and started snapping with my phone. I was still listening to music, so I didn’t hear the boxes move.
something much worse. Groups of the desperate homeless, swaddled in layers of clothes, faces covered by balaclavas and scarves, trying to keep warm. They’d been woken from their slender slumber by some bloke from England, now sprinting back to his hotel for a hot shower, central heating and a big breakfast over which he could recount the whole encounter for the entertainment of others.
I’m not going to show you how to write a novel, or reveal a secret that will make you a sqiillionaire; I’ll leave that to more talented blogganauts. This is my five year mission to boldly stare where no one has stared before … deep into the uncharted space of my navel.
