Our pension, Arilapa, for our first two nights, couldn’t be a more perfect landing spot. In the hills on the outskirts of town, rough around all the edges in all the right ways, it feels like authentic Costa Rica.

Ironically, the owners are not. Arnoldo, born in Virginia, graduate of University of Maryland, is a real character, sarcastic without being mean or tiresome, eccentric, and very friendly. He reportedly has four children, and a wife named Ileana, whom we actually corresponded with via email prior to the trip, but we have not seen them anywhere.

Arnoldo’s brother Santi, on the other hand, we met, and he’s the icing on the Arilapa cake. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he first treated us with an incredible breakfast of eggs, sausage, fried plantains, cheese and bread, YUM!!!, and for our first dinner in Costa Rica he’s preparing a three course meal, for which all the ingredients were hand-picked by him at the Saturday Farmers Market.