As I tell people on my monthly retirement tours, part of the fun of living in Costa Rica is the chance to try the variety of local foods and dishes. Semana Santa (Holy Week) is the perfect time to try Costa Rican food. This is a time of year when Costa Rican families gather for religious reasons and to eat their typical foods. Hopefully you have some tico friends who will invite you to dinner. You taste buds will be grateful.

Here are some of the dishes ticos eat during Semana Santa.

Pastel de Palmitos (palm hearts) y Atún – This is like a pie filled with a mixture of tuna, palmito, eggs and spices

Arroz con leche (Rice and milk) – this is a dessert made of rice, milk, a lot of sugar and other ingredients

Arroz con Palmito – a rice-based dish with palm hearts and chicken broth

Sopa de Pescado – fish soup

Pollo con Palmito – chicken and palm hearts

Miel de Chiverre – a type of honey like sauce made from Sweet White Spaghetti Squash

Chiles marrones Rellenos con Palmito – purple chile filled with palm hearts

Empanadas de chiverre – a wrapped bread dish filled with white spaghetti squash

Conchas de pescado con palmito – a fish-based dish with hearts of palm

ENJOY!

People on my popular relocation retirement tours ask me about the local customs. While we are touring by bus I am giving a continuous seminar about all aspects of living here and the Costa Rican culture. One of the local traditions I talk about is the comilona. Literally a comelón or comelona (female) is a person who eats a lot. In English we use the word glutton to express the same idea.

However, in Costa Rica comelona also can mean a sort of “get together” or ‘cook off” where a huge batch of some type of local dish is prepared and shared with a large number of people. There is no charge for this activity so it usually draws a lot of people and most likely there will be a story in the newspaper or on TV about it.

A few months ago one local company sponsored a comelona where gallo pinto was served to hundreds of people. In case you don’t know gallo pinto is a rice a bean dish that almost every Costa Rican eats for breakfast.

Sardimar is a local company that sells canned fish, mostly tuna. Recently they held a comelona at a local park in San José. The event drew scores of people and was reported on the evening news.

In Costa Rica you have no reason to be bored. There are events like the comelona almost every weekend. They offer an opportunity to get out and experience the Costa Rican culture and meet new people. An important part of living in a foreign country is experiencing the customs and culture.

Since vegetarianism is so popular, it comes as no surprise that I have had many vegetarians on my monthly relocation/retirement tours. Vegetarians always ask me what kinds of foods are available for them in Costa Rica. On all of my monthly tours I make it a point to visit a weekend farmer’s market called a feria. Virtually every kind of fruit and vegetable is found at our outdoor markets. There are even some varieties of fruits and vegetables you don’t see in the States or other parts of the world. A few of our larger famers market are five or six blocks in lenght and have hundreds of stands where products are sold. Besides vegetables and fruits, yogurt, eggs and other foods are sold widely. My tour participants really enjoy touring the feria and are truly amazed with what we have here.

Vegetarians will be happy to know that supermarkets also sell a wide variety of fruits and vegetables along with cheeses, whole wheat and vegetable pastas and soy products. Virtually every major supermarket has a small health food section where vitamins and soy-based foods are on display. Every year more and more of these items are made available as Costa Ricans become more health conscious.

I should a about all of this since I have been a vegetarian for almost 40 years and lived in Costa Rica for the last 30 years. I have never had a problem getting meatless dishes in most restaurants or finding all of the foods I need. There is even a chain of vegetarian restaurants in Costa Rica called Vishnu. The country is not only a nature lovers paradise but a paradise for vegetarians, too. So if you are a vegetarian thinking of living or retiring your dietary needs should not be an obstacle.

Before Guanacaste’s string of beaches was accessible and Costa Rica’s southern zone opened up, the port town of Puntarenas enjoyed its heyday. El Puerto as it is affectionately called by the ticos (Costa Ricans) was the main beach destination for Costa Ricans from the Central Valley for more than a century. In fact, thirty or forty years ago Puntareanas was the tourism epicenter of Costa Rica. The town’s long beach, a seaside palm-shaded promenade called el Paseo de los Turistas with its series of souvenir kiosks, open-air bars and inexpensive have always been a magnet for the locals.

This port city is the best places in the country to savor fresh seafood, including chuchecas (ink-black clams). In fact, the people who live in Puntarenas are affectionately called chuchequeros. Some of the best marisquerías or seafood restaurants in the country are found all along the Paseo de los Turistas. Puntarenas is also the home of another local delight called the Churchill, a beverage similar to a snow cone over which layers of syrup and ice cream are poured.

In the 1990s the town suffered a decline because of a crime problem, many unsavory characters and its dirty beach. Fortunately, everything has changed in recent years and the town has been reborn. The seven-mile brown-sand, palm studded, beach has been cleaned up and now included in the ”Blue Flag” category. All of the recent improvements have led this beach town to be renamed the “New Riviera.” The new Caldera Highway has added to the boom by virtually cutting the driving time in half from the Central Valley.

Previously there were only two ways to pay your annual property taxes. You could go to the municipality office near your home and pay or you could pay though the on-line pages of these Costa Rican banks: LAFISE, Banco de Costa Rica, Banco Nacional and Bancrédito, provided you had an account at one of them.

However, now you can also pay by Internet using the new system of direct debit. This system is called Sinpe or Sistem Nacional de Pagos Electrónicos (National System of Electronic Payments). The advantage is that you no longer have to have an account in one of the banks I mentioned above. Payments can now be made through any Costa Rican bank where you have an account. The process is surprisingly easy. You go to the municipality and authorize them to deduct the money from your account.

This is the type of insider information you learn on my monthly relocation/retirement tours.