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(here is a story for Thursday night, when I first arrived in Costa Rica)
 
I spent 40 minutes at the airport waiting for my driver, fending off working girls who were not taking no for an answer .. right in front of 2-dozen policeman! Two of the chickitas (sp?) resorted to trying to put their hands into my pants .. to see if they could stir up a little interest. I thought they were trying for my wallet. But no .. they were only going after Mini Me.
 
Now I am at my hotel. It's pretty, but rustic.
 

The Bathtub that Baffled! Here is a picture of my bath-tub. At first I thought it must be a shower, but there is no shower head. Just what you see. Taps to turn it on are on the other side of the wall - by the sink. Took a while to figure that out.
 
I tried pulling on the little knob on top of the faucet. The water started going somewhere else. It sounded like it was pouring into the room below mine. Hmm..
 
Tomorrow I'll worry about how the heck I will have a bath. Right now I am too tired.
 
Of course you know what I had trouble with tonight?
 
Yes. The constant bane of the travelling businessman.
 
Ironing a shirt!
 
No iron in the room. So I had a 5 minute conversation with a Spanish-speaking man on the phone, then remembered how that went last time, and went to the desk to talk to someone in English.
 
I talked a girl into letting me into the room that housekeeping uses to iron shirts. Turns out that there is no ironing board there. Just a plywood table with some cloth stapled to it. A cloth that was so dirty and grimy and smelly and disgusting that I don't have adequate English skills to describe it. I took the iron back to my room and ironed my shirt using a towel on top of my night table.
 
By the way. I never did fix my zipper. Once I looked up the instructions, and discovered that I had to take my pants half apart to do it. Well .. I had visions of only making the situation worse. So I've had my zipper held together the last 36 hours by the safety pin that usually holds my shirt together. Problems only pop up under extreme circumstances :-) and it's a long process to go pee. But it came in handy tonight when it baffled the chickitas that were trying to get in.
 
I'm going to drink the rest of this fuzzy-pink-drink they handed me (some kind of Costa Rican rum and fruit drink, I think) and try to get some sleep.