Lunch - Vuelta al Mundo

It was Lance’s turn to select a place to eat lunch this weekend and he chose Vuelta al Mundo (Around the World). We stumbled by chance on this hostel/restaurant several months ago. We were walking across from the Grecia park and saw a menu sign displayed on the street. It was impressive. We had no idea there was a hostel with a restaurant at this location.

As is usual in Costa Rica, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Upon entering, we walked through a large area and then out into a garden area with lots of tables for seating. Service is very attentive. Since we had already looked at their menu online, we knew what we wanted to order.

Here is the menu:

Drinks: Lance ordered a Belgium beer and I asked for a mojito. He said the beer was really good, especially since it has a 6.6% alcohol content, which is more than a Canadian (5%) or an American beer (4%)! My mojito was refreshing, with fresh mint and lime.

Lance’s beer glass matched his beer bottle:

We ordered a selection of four Argentinian empanadas - two chorizo and two ham, cheese and mushroom - to go (para llevar):

For our lunch, Lance selected the tempura with shrimp and vegetables and I ordered the green curry with fish. Both orders came with jasmine rice. My curry was excellent - loaded with vegetables and fish in a coconut sauce. As is usual in Costa Rica, restaurant food portions are large and we asked to have quite a bit of the tempura wrapped up to go.

As an added bonus, there is a resident cat! He/She came over to us for a pat several times. This cat has the most beautiful coloration:

There were some Octoberfest food and drink offerings which we didn’t know about beforehand and the choices looked yummy also:

The outdoor (but covered) eating area was decorated for Halloween:

Some photos of the hostel/restaurant:

If you check out the menu, you will see they offer dishes from “around the world”, including Canadian Quebec poutine! 

We highly recommend this restaurant and will be going back to try out more of their menu selections. 

Click on images to enlarge.

Spiders - A Funny Story

Many years ago, Lance and myself were guests at a cottage in the province of Quebec, Canada. The cottage was on a lake, it had a sauna, a huge stone fireplace, a boathouse and was very, very nice.

We had our own bedroom and one night as we were settling down to sleep, I told Lance there were spiders in the room. He said, "Don't worry, I will always protect you from spiders". Okay, that was fine with me. I never forgot that he said those words and he never forgot either.

Now that we live in the tropics, his spider protection duties have evolved into including cockroaches, scorpions, tarantulas, millipedes, centipedes and ants. We practice catch and release, except for the ants .... the leaf cutter ants can decimate a bush in no time flat. We use pellets and sprays for them. When ants get into our house - and they will in the tropics, all the time - we have to use sprays.

Today I did a laundry and, as usual, hung everything on the line to dry in the tropical sun and trade winds. At this time of year (the dry season), laundry dries fast. Brought the laundry inside and was making up our bed .... put the fitted sheet on and I saw something running out from the sheet onto the floor. Lance! Lance! A big spider just ran out from our sheet onto the floor!

He gallantedly came inside, got down to look under the bed and said, "Is that it?" I got down also and looked - it was an old, dead brown leaf! I found two more "spiders" in the fitted sheet .... they were blown into the fitted sheet by the wind .... and blew out when I shook the sheet out to put it on the bed.

Here is a scorpion that Lance found in our bedroom recently. We released it into the vacant field near us.