Cartago and a day in San José

Righto so here's our first Costa Rica update, dutifully delayed several weeks to heighten your anticipation. I'm stationed in a hotel on the side of the lovely pan-american highway (you know those no motor brake signs? you are lucky to have them). It's a pretty boring little area unfortunately, but luckily it's not too far away from Cartago proper or the capital of Costa Rica, San Jose. Here's a characteristic view along the highway. Note the school bus chop shop.

Anyway a few weekends ago I took a solo trek to Cartago itself. There are two main sites to see in Cartago, and the first are these ruins of a church. One thing about the area that's kinda interesting is that almost everything's been destroyed a couple of times due to earthquakes etc (we actually already had an earthquake since I've been here though it was not terribly impressive). The ruins enclose a small public garden and were really neat.
The second thing to see in Cartago is the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles. It's the only thing that's survived since way back in the day and it did look quite impressive from this side. Unfortunately the opposite side had been remodeled in the "large flat slabs of unadorned concrete" style so popular with basilicas of the day.
That was pretty much it for that weekend, and really there hasn't been much else to show for weekend adventures so far. Mostly I've been going out with co-workers to watch various soccer games or to 80s music nights or what have you. I'm hoping to start seeing more stuff soon here, but unfortunately I'm stuck trying to find people who want to go as well. ANYWAY this last weekend I went on a tour of San José through the hotel with a nice Swiss couple in town for the weekend. We started at the national theater which was very pretty.
The inside was quite lovingly maintained as well, which was nice to see.
It had a very European style going on, and contained some really cool paintings/sculptures/lighting fixtures/ceilings (as demonstrated here)
Fun fact: There was a JFK assassination attempt here.
After the national theater we went to the museum of money of Costa Rica. It covered everything from early civilizations and gold all the way to modern bills. This sounds like it should be really boring but given the caliber of illustrations they have going on it was pretty cool. To wit:
We ended the day fruitlessly trying to find a USA soccer jersey for myself and went on to a nice late lunch on a hill over the city. It had a very good view and very nice food but puzzlingly bad service.
And here's their logo and name:
So yea, that's what's been going on. My work at the plant's finally starting to pick up now (there was a lot of twiddling of thumbs at the beginning there) and I'm feeling pretty good about what I'm doing. I hope to get to a volcano just outside of town this weekend, hopefully the plan will work out! Until later!