As you know prohibition is a law which prohibits alcohol. Typically, the manufacturing, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages is restricted or illegal. Don’t worry alcohol is legal in Costa Rica. You can buy it in almost everywhere and the legal drinking age is eighteen. However, on Good Thursday and Friday in Costa Rica stores cannot sell alcoholic beverages. The name of this two day prohibition is called La Ley Seca (The Dry Law). The law is in effect from 12:01 a.m. on Thursday until midnight on Friday. Seals are placed on the doors of liquor stores and the shelves where liquor is displayed in supermarkets are covered and sealed. By the way, until this year’s presidential election it was also against the law to sell alcohol on election day.

What Costa Ricans do is stock up on booze prior to Good Thursday, so it really doesn’t matter if liquor cannot be sold.
You can learn all about the ways things work in Costa Rica on one of my relocation/retirement tours which are like a continuous seminar.

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.

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.

If longevity depends on lifestyle then living or retiring here may just what you need.

Few people know that Costa Ricans are among the world’s leaders in life expectancy.Their life expectancy for both men and women is higher than that of the United States. The average life span in 2009 was 79.3 years. Although women outlive men, the overall life expectancy of 79-plus years puts the country in the world’s upper echelon regarding longevity.

Costa Ricans are the happiest people in the world according to a recent study and this may be the main reason for their longevity. Other contributing factors may be their lifestyle, cradle-to-grave health care system, diet, care-free-live-for-today outlook on life, a lack of stress or some other intangible. Whatever the reason you can probably prolong your life by moving here. I personally know scores of foreigners who say they never felt better after relocating here. Many, in jest, say that it must something in the water that makes them feel so good. I would venture to say that it boils down to the lifestyle. There is something uplifting about living in this fantastic country. People feel revitalized. You would have to spend some time here to understand exactly what I mean. Those who have moved here can surely relate to it.

I always try to convey the above to the participants on my monthly relocation/retirement tours as one of the most compelling reasons to relocate here.