Eileen Joll

We started the day by going to church at Templo Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes - the Catholic church in the town center. The service was in Spanish and there were a lot of children there with balloons. The service was dedicated to the celebration of children with a children's procession and children's choir. Standing room only.

We wanted to go to a soccer game. The season just started this week and we had our choice of a division 2 game in Sarchi or a division 1 game in Alajuela. The Alajuela team is ranked as one of the best. We chose to go to the Alajuela game after confirming with our neighbor that it was at the home stadium. We bought tickets on line and decided to go into town early. We had spent the night there when we first arrived, but since that was New year's eve/new years day, most things were closed. The town we saw now was 100% different. It was lively with a lot of people about and music in the park. We spent some time at the cultural center which was both a history and art museum. While we were there, they opened the access to the roof where we could get a birds eye view of the area. Supposedly on a clear day, you can see the ocean from there. The workers did not speak English, but another tourist was translating things for us. Alujuela us known as the city of mangos and the park is surrounded by mango trees. After walking around a little bit, we ate tacos at a corner place while watching a local soccer game on the field across the street. When we walked by the soccer game, we saw the tourist who was translating for us playing defense!

We headed to the field, a fifteen minute walk away. As we got closer to the field, it looked pretty dead and we wondered if we had the right day. Looking again at the tickets, we had the right day, but wrong field - not what was listed on the website. The game was being played at the national stadium in San Jose, 25 minutes away. We summoned an Uber and got to the game just before it started. The national stadium is home to the national team and holds other sporting events. It holds 35,000 people - one and half times more people than the Alajuelan stadium. When ordering tickets I could only get tickets on the upper sections so we were expecting a very large crowd. We were a little disappointed to see that the stadium was only about 20% full and there was no one in the lower seats. It turns out that the championship game that Alajuela lost in in December ended in a riot. As a result they were required to close their local stadium for the first 6 games of the new season, and why all of the fans were seated so far away from the field. The game we saw was no where near that exciting although some of the crowds comments were. While Alajuela dominated possession of the ball, the opposing keeper denied them of any goals and it ended in a 0-0 tie.
We didn't plan on going to San Jose as no one really has had anything positive to say about it or things to do there, but it was good to get a glimpse of it while driving in.Read more