Un Momento: En El Taxi

Today I arrived at the airport in San Jose.  I met up with the program director and coordinator, who promptly bought me and two other students lunch and then shipped us via taxi to our hotel to meet our other fellow students.  We hung out at the pool and got to know each other, then walked an hour to a thai restaurant for dinner.  Because of the sheer exhaustion felt by many of us due to long travel times and general sensory overload, some of us decided to take a taxi back to the hotel.  From these two taxi experiences, I've determined a few things about driving in Costa Rica:

• Most streets don't have street signs.  
• Most streets with multiple lanes don't have lines dividing those lanes... and even if there are lines, you don't actually have to follow them.
• "Alto", or stop signs, are only placed at intersections for decoration.  No one actually stops. 
• A red light is actually a stop sign.  Or rather, a pause sign.  
• If the grass on the side of the road is on fire, no one really cares

Also, I learned that cab drivers can't break huge colones bills given to us by the program director, especially when a cab for 4 people came to a whopping total of $5 US.  Instead, the doorman paid it for us with the promise that we'd pay him back tomorrow.