Costa Rica Day 7.

Today is my last day in Costa Rica. Since my flight left in the evening today, I stayed in San José. I decided to go to the Gold Museum in the downtown area. I have heard really good things about this museum, and I was not disappointed. When I walked in the door, I was confronted with a gigantic hall covered in display cases. I had to go get my ticket first, and I waited impatiently in line to get it. When I finally got in, there were so many things to see. There are three floors too the museum, but it is underground, under the Plaza de la Cultura. The first is the main gold floor, it has thousands of gold pieces in it, jewelery, statuettes, and decorations. Did you know that gold is very hard to find in Costa Rica, so some of it is what is called Tumbaga. I saw a whole bunch of different statuettes, most of them depicting animals like jaguars or frogs for some reason, but there were some of people too. There was also a lot of jewelry, and apparently the natives wore a lot of it in everyday life. I found this cool. The weirdest piece of jewelry I found was a pair of earrings, about two inches long and cylindrical, with a diameter of about three quarters of an inch. They did not look comfortable at all! I would hate to wear them. I loved this on necklace, though. It was made of small gold beads interspersed with jade beads in the shape of teardrop. It was really lovely, and I would have loved to have it, but I was in a museum, and you're generally not aloud to steal from museums. On the next floor down, I saw a collection simmilar to the one a floor above me, but this time, not with gold, but with precious stones. It was really pretty. I absolutely loved the color in these pieces, red, green, blue, and purple. It was such a cool museum. On the last floor, they had a collection of tools and utensils the natives used in daily life, and a section on how they made the gold figures. I especially liked this part. They showed what they used to melt the gold, and how they refined it. They also showed how they shaped it into the intricate shapes I saw upstairs. They had a life-sized model of a man doing this, but the man creeped me out, so I didn't look at it much. After I finished looking at the museum, and had bought a book on old myths of the native people, I left. I had lunch at a little café across the street form the entrance, and I headed to the airport to go home. I had to rush to make my plane, but I got here, and I'm writing this while we wait to take off. Oh, the stewardess just told me to shut off my computer. Next stop, Santa Barbara! a model of the native people. a necklace at the museum