one my favorite fellow-travelers on earth, with whom i’ve always dreamed of traveling somewhere in the third world, shares this costa-rican micro-travelogue and photo:

I was essentially kidnapped by these two forty year old ‘friends’ of my uncle who were these chain smoking ladies on a quest for special glasses to see the solar eclipse. they refused to let me out of the car even when my friend and i kept being like ‘this is really boring, we want to go’. then, they took us to a karaoke bar were they drank me under the table and kept singing songs about my chinese friend in spanish thinking she wouldn’t understand. finally after insisting that ‘this really wasn’t fun, and we are really tired, can we go?’ they finally set us loose in the middle of the night in san jose. after that, i got my bag stolen when i dozed off on the bus, and my friend and i had to share the same 3 t-shirts between us for the rest of our 2 week trip. the only cool part was the placement of this town, which you can imagine the number of times it’s burnt down, as that *is* a volcano behind it.