I got this picture from a friend of mine in South Africa, Bruce. It took me a few seconds to realize the guy is drawing beer out of a computer! Very funny…

Though as I write this I have a bit of a hangover, so the sight of the beer is making me a bit queezy. Costa Rica is most certainly a beer-drinking country. We don’t have lots of great beer, but what we do have is consumed en masse!

As if day-to-day drinking aren’t enough, we have several festivals, one of which was supposedly voted by some "Top 10" show as one of the Top 10 beer-drinking festivals in the world. It’s called Palmares. And it’s in the City of Palmares every January.

The crowds are sometimes unbearable, but the drive home is worse. The good news is they stop nearly every car to see if the driver has been drinking. The bad news is this makes the one-and-a-half hour drive home a four hour drive home. Not fun at 4am!

Something I see at the festivals here that I’ve never seen before is the construction of huge dance clubs and bars with scaffolding. Yes, scaffolding! They’ll pile thousands of folks into these contraptions and jump up-and-down. I stay away. Looks pretty frightening to me!

Another popular festival is Zapote, which really starts  on Christmas Eve each year. Two years ago I got caught in the worst crowd situation I’ve ever been in. Some fireworks exploded and they were trying to get a couple of ambulances into the area. So they roped off a big section of the main walkway and crowded us all in together. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life! People were pushing and shoving like crazy.

Aside from that little incident (which was over very quickly), it’s great fun and an amazing way to see — and participate in — the local culture. Beer.