A quiet and wild Xmas in Costa Rica. (Part 1)
I'll now commence to cover my recent time on the rich coast, as I said I would in my previous post. I got back to Costa Rica on the Wednesday before Xmas. Arriving at my apartment I set down my bags and the gatekeeper gave me the now spare set of keys to the place. Chocolate dust seemed to be embedded in every pore of my dwelling as my ex-bruja had decided to use it as her kitchen prior to swanning off on the rollercoaster of her own ego.

I called my pal Nicky and was told of a mission to the cinema that evening to see King Kong. This movie would be better entitled "Running with Dinosaurs" and the near perfection of special effects cannot mask the fact that it amounts to not much more than three hours of rancid cheese and directorial self-indulgence. The 187 minutes of catatonia that is this digital cellulose coma was capped in the last moments by Jack Black who managed to utter "It was beauty that killed the beast!" for any amoeba watching that might not have been able to work it out for themselves. Peter Jackson should have saved the countless millions in production costs by filming the whole thing on a camcorder with handpuppets using the cash he saved to pay Anthony Hopkins and Renee Zellweger for the voice-overs. It would have been just as believable.

The trip to the cinema was an event in itself. While stopped at a light in a taxi on my way to the cinema a car pulled up alongside, driving was a buddy of mine, Esteban whom I work with in Canada and had left the office two days before me. It's a small country! It's a pity that the taxi driver didn't follow Esteban, as he shot across a roundabout and then drove down the on ramp to a freeway the wrong way. Realising what he had done, he smiled, carried on driving and told me that we would cross over a space in the centre reservation when there was one. He had a change of heart and a change of pants when the headlights of another vehicle came hurtling towards us from the blind bend we were approaching. Luckily, the taxista was just as without regard for speed restraint in reverse as he was in forward motion. It was almost with relief that he swerved backwards out on to the busy roundabout we had been on only a couple of minutes previously.

Stay tuned for the next less than exciting episode of my life.