Santa Cruz Shopping

When I hear someone talk about the town of Santa Cruz, I immediately think of California.  However, there is a Santa Cruz here in Costa Rica as well.  It is located about an hour and a half by car south and east of Tamarindo in the province of Guanacaste.  It is the second largest city in the province.  The largest city is Liberia where the new airport is located that we flew into to get here.  Rumor had it that there was good shopping in Santa Cruz so eight of us hired a van and decided to see what we could find.

 

When we arrived at Santa Cruz we did not see any high-rise buildings or shopping malls.  Instead we found a town of about 45,000 people who are mostly farmers, fishermen, and ordinary workers.  The shopping district of the town consisted of this one one-way street. 

 

Our van driver, who was very knowledgeable and spoke very good English, drove to the middle of town.  He parked across the street from this old church and by this beautiful park.  

The park was the “town square” with statues on each corner.

 

There was also a nice area where all the old men could gather and solve the problems of the day.

 

Across the street from the park was a beautiful old Catholic church.  (I am not sure what happened to the Methodists and the Lutherans when these countries were being discovered.)  Here is the steeple of the old church...

and the steeple of the new church.

 

The inside of the church was beautiful.

All around the inside were large stained glass windows in the pattern of hands in various positions.

The walls of the church were made with clay blocks, the color of terra cotta.  The blocks were hollow to allow the sun and the air to filter through.

After leaving the church we were ready to do some serious shopping.  We started walking down the street to see what kind of shops we could find.   One of the first shops we came to was a bicycle shop (our Bella Vista neighbor Josh would like this).

 

I had been wondering, if you owned a car here, are there any repair shops?    Our Costa Rica neighbor lady, who has her car for sale, told me it was difficult to find a reputable mechanic.  We did find an auto repair shop, however, located right in the middle of Main Street—it did appear to be break time though.

When we first arrived in Costa Rica, Gail and I went to Villareal and thought we had found a real treasure when we found a small floor fan.  It has been a real boon for us since we do not use air conditioning very much at all.   Wouldn’t you know though, here we found all the fans we could possibly want.

We also found a hardware store jammed full of anything you might possibly need in the way of fix it items.

 

As we continued down the street we found a Fabric Shop,

 

and a furniture store.

 

We also saw a veterinarians office/pet shop combination.

 

Almost all of the stores, just like in the US, were having a sale. (To get the price of these shoes, you just double the colones and remove the last three digits...or divide by 500.)  The cost in US dollars would be about $14.

 

The jeans in this picture are on sale for $5 and $6 and the clothes on the rack would cost $2.60.

 

And you could buy lottery tickets just about anywhere.

We followed this young woman who could hardly walk because the heels on her shoes were way too high for these ragged streets.

 

It was kinda comical so we followed her for a while.  We followed her past this relatively new Pizza Hut.

We followed her all the way to the department store that was the main objective of our trip---everything half price!!!

 

When we left we passed the rocking chair store.  I was tempted to take one of their products for a test ride.

After all this shopping we had a very unique lunch.  But, I will have to talk about that tomorrow.