The inside exhibits this time were all paintings by Costa Ricans and somehow I lacked the motivation to photograph any. Sorry. Here’s just a few of my photos of both the Eaton’s & Huskey’s and of some outside art. To see more of my photos of that gallery see my gallery from an earlier visit: January 2024 Museum of Costa Rican Art with better photos of the museum. It was a tour from the Art House of Atenas I participated in and was feeling better then.
Museum of Cost Rican Artists, in the old 1940’s downtown airport terminal building.
Below is a gallery of 6 shots from that day & lunch at Jalapeños . . .
Old friends from Nashville, Gary & Kenna Eaton and their traveling companions, the Huskey’s, recently visited Costa Rica and I had the privilege of sharing some bits of my adopted country both before and after their 8-day CARAVAN “Costa Rica Natural Paradise” TOUR!
Walter does a “Selfie” with our group between the Jade and National Museums of Costa Rica.
They arrived on November 9, a day early for the tour, and my driver, Walter, and I took them to two favorite museums in San Jose on the 10th, mentioned as a postscript in my post that day. We toured both the Jade Museum and the National Museum that gave them an overview of the country they were about to tour. See the very few photos I made that day in the gallery: Nov 10, Jade & National Museums. To be honest, I’m beginning to be too old and feeble to be a very good host! 🙂 But they were very patient with me and Walter was a wonderful host!
They concluded their tour on the 17th and we saw an art museum before taking the Huskey’s to the airport. Then 5 days with the Eaton’s, which the next few posts will summarize. And eventually I will complete the photo gallery of their visit. 🙂
This past Saturday I went on a van with a group from the Art House Atenas to visit two art museums in San Jose (and there are many more!). The first was the National Museum of Costa Rican Art where all the exhibits are rotating except for the statue garden. Then after a lunch in the city, we visited the world-famous Jade Museum in San Jose which of course has a lot of jade carvings, but is more about Pre-Columbian Art and culture.
I have a gallery completed of photos of some of the art with my cell phone camera which is allowed in both museum as long as you don’t use a flash. The feature photo is from the “Dark Valley” exhibit by Costa Rican Adrián Arguedas Ruano, mostly of traditional uses of masks here in the earlier indigenous cultures, though my favorite CR exhibit was “Dream World” by Costa Rican Flora Sáenz Langlois with her nature paintings of what she calls her “Magical Forests”(one below). And my favorite things in the Jade were the pottery or ceramic work and the human indigenous panoramas of pre-Columbian life.
I’ve seen both museums in the past, but there is always something new and enjoyable about any museum visit! 🙂
One of the “Magical Forest” paintings by Langlois at the National Costa Rican Art Museum.
See more photos in the gallery: 2024 Jan 17 – Two Museums or there are 3 more shots below as samples . . .
At least I think that taking a small plane to any destination in Costa Rica is a type of adventure and I love making cellphone photos from my window seat. Here’s a few shots from my recent flight to Limón, a 30 minute flight compared to a 5 hour drive. I fly to the more distant places requiring more than a 3 hour drive, like Limón, Liberia, Puerto Jiménez, Golfito and Uvita. Sansa is now the only in-country commercial airlines since Canadian-owned Nature Air went bankrupt. There are more than one charter services and a few private pilots like my driver Walter who, if you hire him to fly, rents a plane. So it is more expensive than Sansa on which you can fly to anywhere in Costa Rica from the San Jose airport for about a hundred dollars each way, some less and some more.
One shot for the email version, then a little gallery where you click an image to see it larger.
One of my many breaks from sorting and processing photos from my Maquenque visit last week was to make a doctor visit in San Jose yesterday, then have my driver to take me to a hotel to greet friends who were in the Nashville Photography Club with me “way back when.” Charlie and Ellen, who now live in Cookeville, TN and their traveling friend Cynthia. They came early for an extra day in San Jose before their two-week nature tour of Costa Rica begins. We had lunch at our famous 19th Century National Theater and walked through the Central Mercado, a city park and the Metropolitan Cathedral. Here’s 3 cell phone shots of their stop in San Jose.
Charles, Ellen and Cynthia in front of the National Theater of Costa Rica.
“The Flutist” Statue in front of the National Theater in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Pope John Paul II statue at Metropolitan Cathedral in San Jose, Costa Rica by celebrated Costa Rican sculptor Jorge Jiménez Deredia who has a piece at the Vatican.
It is always nice to have visitors from the states to stop by either my home in Atenas or to let me greet them at the airport or at a stop on their tour. Now I get back to sorting and processing so many photos from the Maquenque Lodge & Reserve where it is looking like a new record on the number of bird species I photographed there, possibly 68! 🙂 More from Maquenque tomorrow!
Here are more views of the new Central Park Sign including a selfie and what it looks like at night and from behind! 🙂 My earlier reports on the sign did not include the finished product at night or from behind! 🙂
At night your eyes see the color of the art on the letters and thus not as bright as this white in my camera. And that white spot in middle of sun is yellow to your eyes, though still bright! 🙂Continue reading “Park Sign at Night + Other New Views”
One of the fun things about some of my trips is getting to fly in a small plane. Though I almost had to hire a taxi to drive down today because yesterday I got an email from Sansa Airlines telling me my flight to Palmar Sur was canceled. But fortunately when I called Sansa they had one seat left on the 9 am to Quepos which is a little bit further from Uvita, but okay – an hour taxi drive which is better than 4 hours drive from Atenas. 🙂
I always keep my cellphone camera busy on these little short 30 minute flights. Here’s 5 of the many shots I made:
My last bird in this series, Clay-colored Thrush (eBird description), is special in multiple ways. First, he is the National Bird of Costa Rica, not because of his colors but rather because he is the bird that the indigenous people say sings in the rainy season every April & May. And special for me because I’m including one of my latest images as the feature and one of my first bird shots here back in 2015 while still in the apartments, Hacienda La Jacaranda. Read more in The Backstory and see some of my many other shots of this bird in my Yigüirro or Clay-colored Thrush Gallery with shots from 16 locations across Costa Rica.
Costa Rica’s answer to the American Halloween tradition is “Day of the Masquerade” or Dia de la Mascarada (Wikipedia article) and today I experienced a tiny fringe of it at my favorite Supermarket . . .
Dia de la Mascarada a La Coope Supermercado Parking Lot
