20,000+ steps, according to my watch.
Miami isn't all that glamorous as Hollywood portrays it to be. From Miami Vice in the 80s to that Versace mini-series recently, you'd think that South Beach is all glitz and glam. We went downtown, too, and it was even more depressing. The whole city is old and dirty, and to be honest, kinda scary. I walked Seattle a few years ago, right before the pandemic, and it seemed safer there. Mind you, they were already in the thick of their homeless problem, but I felt safer there.
Seems like Miami is stuck in the 80s. Lots of old, decrepit buildings. I didn't see the charm. Plus, the people there weren't quite as nice compared to other cities in America.
We got to Costa Rica at around 10pm and we were so hungry, so we walked around looking for a place to eat. Turns out our hotel was in the more affluent neighborhoods of San Jose, so it wasn't really a walking-friendly place. Escazu didn't have a lot of sidewalks so it was kind of scary walking around close to midnight. Plus, it seems like Ticos like sleeping early, as there were no people outside at that hour.
24-hour establishments aren't a thing in Escazu, and we had to walk about 4 kilometers to a McDonald's in the next town, Guachipelin. The store closed a few minutes before we arrived. The only 24-hour place that we could buy food from was a gas station convenience store, Delimart. They don't even have 7-11s here. Good thing that the gas station food was awesome.
I'll hold off any judgment about the walkability of Costa Rica, as I've still only seen this trendier district of Escazu. This is the place where diplomats live: I saw the residence of the ambassador of UAE and another middle-eastern country while walking back to our hotel.
Also, for a country that supposedly speaks good English, they actually don't speak English at all. Even the concierge at our 5-star hotel barely spoke English. We roamed the mall near our hotel, and it was so hard to shop because no one spoke English. I had to resort to using the google translate app to converse with the salespeople. Oddly, the only person who spoke English well enough to hold a conversation with was a cashier at a KFC. At least in the Philippines, even street vendors can talk to foreigners in broken English.
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