Week 4

I have found that there are a lot of mixed views on the subject of restaurants in Costa Rica. Some members of my tica family say that people only go out to eat if it is a special occasion and some people say they only eat out if they are pressed for time; some people eat at McDonalds as a treat, and some eat at McDs only if they really can't get home with time to make food. Within my tica family, this does not appear to be a generational difference, but I believe that it could be elsewhere in Costa Rica. In the city it appears that there are a lot of different restaurants; there are pollo stands, italian places, chinese places, North American fast food, etc, so there is a very wide variety. However, where and what a person eats does depend on how much money and time a person has. What we consider fast food in the US is cheap and fast, in Costa Rica it appears that "fast food" is prepared fast, but not eaten quickly, nor is it cheap. My trip to Tacobell was very interesting and I witnessed many students on their lunch breaks eating at Tacobell in large groups, who were lounging and wasting time. Also, Tacobell is not cheap, I bought a combo (which was reasonably priced) but it was still not what I would consider typical fast food. It is unapparent when foreign restaurants came to Costa Rica, because of the slow transition to their popularity, but from what I can gather, Tacobell came to Costa Rica in the early 2000s (2006-2009-ish), so those types of restaurants in Costa Rica is still a very new idea. In regards to whether or not the foreign restaurants are a good thing...that causes mixed opinions as well. It depends on how much Costa Rican culture is lost in the acceptance of these facilities. To an extent, every society has to evolve through time and Costa Rica is on the path towards modernization, by offering its citizens convenience locations for food. At the same time, the presence of restaurants like Tacobell could easily take away from the culture of Costa Rica and could turn Costa Rica into a scary child of the United States, which poor health, poor public facilities, and a low functioning economy (to be extreme). In all, it depends on how Costa Ricans chose to use these facilities that will determine the future health of the people and how much culture is "lost" or "developed."

Tacobell!! Let me just say that the menu is much smaller than the menu in the US and it is a little bit more expensive, not by much, but a little.

Tacobell is set up about the same as it is in the US, but in Costa Rica it is visually more appealing on the inside; although it looks nicer and more inviting, there is not much variety on the menu to keep more people coming.

Tukasa is a typical Costa Rican restaurant that serves a house-dish with rice, fried platanose, ensalada, and some form of meat. They also have a very large variety of deserts and drinks.

However, the only problem with this restaurant is that they do not bring you menus unless you ask for them. When you arrive they bring you water and some type of juice. If you would like to eat anything other than a standard meal, you have to ask for a menu after they serve you juice. *I was not given/told about this option until we left the facility.*

I find that most of the restaurants around San Jose never had lines and were not ever full, but they were always busy. It is amazing that there is such little wait for a dining table, but at the same time it is not surprising because most people I believe do not eat out all the time. I believe this goes back to the fact that, in Costa Rica, dining out is a luxury and it is for special occasions, thus people take their time eating and they are not rushed out. The fact that most people don't eat out makes this all possible, because then the restaurants don't have customers waiting and they don't feel the need to make people leave for "turn-over" the tables. 

I generally think this is a good stance and that the US should try to go back to our "roots" and eat in more. But I also do not believe this to be possible and most of the people in the US that eat out (a lot) probably do not know how to cook very well and thus they wouldn't want to eat-in. Most of the US has lost its appreciation of anything self-prepared-- think about it. We have action-figures that are "batteries included," frozen meals, most of the items you buy in Walmart are made in China, etc. The current US sentiment is "why bother when you can have someone else do it," for every occasion; why teach your children, when you can send them to boarding-school. This sentiment is slowly going back to the point where we buy local foods, recycle in the home, homeschool, and many schools in the US have CTE courses for technology, culinary, furniture making... the US is slowly going back to producing what we need in the same country as we use it. But it is a slow process and with it comes the fact that we try to build-up our economy by spreading out to other countries and spreading the "unnecessary" mindset we now have. Making this a standard process of repetition; the US exports, then US absorbs other cultures, then the US exports and the other country absorbs our culture, then the US needs imports and absorbs other cultures...etc. (of course this is a mild exageration)