Costa Rican Chinese Food

All week, we'd planned to find a restaurant where we could enjoy Costa Rican cuisine after church. When we'd last visited Mexico in 2008, one of the couples had a little Mexican sandwich shop they visited most Sundays after church. I really liked the idea of having a place we regularly went to on Sundays, giving us the opportunity to really get to know the owners and workers there. Relational evangelism is very effective in Latin American countries.

So after church, we came home and changed clothes, then set out on an adventure to find a Costa Rican restaurant. In hindsight, we should've done a bit of planning during the week to figure out just where the open restaurants where. Or, at the very least, we should've asked one of the two missionary couples we met at church. But we didn't. We were "winging it" for sure.

It had begun sprinkling on the way home from church, so we grabbed our umbrellas and began our trek. The sodas were not open. And on the street we selected, there were not a lot of options. There was an open-air bar/restaurant, but we weren't quite sure about that one. Was it more restaurant....or more bar?

Finally, we settled on a Costa Rican Chinese restaurant. That just seems like an oxymoron, doesn't it? Costa Rican Chinese food! About the only thing Chinese in the restaurant were the pictures on the wall and the food names. Even the food items themselves weren't anything like their American cousins. The sweet and sour chicken, for example, was very tasty. But it was not exactly like sweet and sour chicken I'm used to. (And don't get me started on the egg rolls!) Perhaps the best tasting dish was the kids' fried rice plate with chicken, onion, and pineapple. It was delicious! But again, we were a bit lost in translation, so we ended up ordering WAY more than we actually could eat. The nice thing about this is that we have leftovers for another meal.

We set out from our house, determined to have an adventure. And we definitely found one. Next week, I think we'll do a bit more homework ahead of time and have a few places scoped out. We are, after all, still on a quest to taste authentic Costa Rican cuisine. We've been here a week now and it has eluded us. Maybe next Sunday will finally be the day we get to sample some.

And if not, we know where we can get some good Costa Rican Chinese food.