Since Costa Rica is by far the most expensive country in Central America, I had decided to just rush straight throug and rather spend my time in Panama. After leaving Ben and Barry in Ricas, Nicaragua, I bussed straight down to the capitol for a layover. Found me a hostel for the day and picked out a nightbus for the next day. I quickly discovered two things that changed my plans and partly destroyed my budget. The first: Spains national team were playing costa rica at the national stadium in San Jose just two days later. The second: Costa Rica hosts what is supposed to be the most biodiverse area on earth. "Parque National Corcovado".

Since I hadn´t been in a football - stadium since Cuenca, Ecuador, and because it was THE best team in the world, the game could not be missed. It also gave me an excuse to spend two days getting to know the capitol of Costa Rica, which is far from as bad as some people say. It is noticibly wealthier than most other big cities on the contintent and peple are nice and welcomming. On the other hand, it´s pretty noisy and extremely expensive for Central American standards. In the two days there, I succesfully finished my only real objective, buying a camera. I scaled down from the previous superzoom to a cheap Lumix pocket camera. Practical, cheap and decent!
Police outpost in the centre.

Finally match day was there. I left early morning to the stadium to get tickets and was met with the same message at every counter, sold out. Luckily, the black marked tickets were pretty much the same price as from the counter and sellers were not excactly hard to track down. Since Spain was the opposition this was obviously a big deal for the Costa Ricans, or "Ticas" as they are called. The stadium house 30 000 people, and it was almost packed. Soccer is big in Costa Rica, and the spanish are the big heroes. Like we Norwegians support English teams, they support spanish teams. Nobody I talked to had even a slightest grain of hope for victory. And I had to agree, we were all there to see Spain play ball and Costa Ricans running pointlessly in between for 90 minutes. That prediction proved itseld wrong from kick off. Costa Rica was by every means in the game.

1-0 came midway first half. 2-0 not to long after. Costa Rica was actually beating the world champions. The atmosphere was way over average!

Unfortunately, Spain got better and better and eventually knocked in 2-1 10 minutes before the final whistle. The last ten minutes was a battle against the clock for the Ticas, and they were terribly close to winning. But the brilliant spanish players broke them down in the 93th minute. Costa Rica 2-2 Spain.

A great experience, and even though the score board said 2-2 Costa Rica won that game.