Mucho Gusto wrote:
Ssss350 wrote:
i want to hang out with prolong
Ssss350,
....
Maybe you can educate the rest of us here. Who is
prolong? And why do you want to hang out with him? Just curious...

I have no idea who this "prolong" character is either, but I want to hang out with him too.

BTW, I'd also like to meet that mysterious member called "The MAN", who keeps posting about me as well. I heard he once appeared on BMTV.
MG,
You or anyone else can call me "prolong" if you want. I'd know you wouldn't mean anything by it (and appreciate your kind supportive words). Even if someone did (and who can really tell what passes through Florida's head

), it would take much more than that to really provoke me. Like when people refer to me as "Projilo". Man that REALLY gets me going.
Hey Florida, I just noticed you took me out of your tagline. What gives? Don't I get equal billing with ID anymore?
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To answer the thread topic question. It all comes down to personal taste and level of CR experience. A vet who has already played out all the major sights and activities around SJ will most likely have a different answer than a newbie who has just started going down and for whom everything is new. I think there is also a wide dichotomy or at least a long continuum between guys who come down entirely or almost entirely for mongering and those whose purposes are much more mixed.
It certainly is entirely possible to make the Gulch (or Gluch if you prefer) a full time occupation, at least if you also throw in the various MP's scattered around the city. For those guys the day usually starts fairly late after a late night of carousing. A leisurely breakfast followed by a walking tour of the various tico MP's which could take whatever is left of the morning until you come across one that has a halfway decent looking chica with you can bust your first nut. Then comes a leisurely lunch and maybe an hour or two checking e-mails, posting on CRT or taking care of some other order of business before your afternoon visit to one of the gringo MP's. Then the BM or SL for happy hour with your buds to scope out the first arrivals of the early evening, or just shoot the shit, drink some beers, boast about the prior night's conquests and make plans for the upcoming evening. A leisurely dinner then a night on the prowl at either the BM and/or a trip to one of the night time strip clubs with your wingmen before making your pick for the night and doing it all over again the next day.
For me that would get very old after the first few days and I can't even imagine how the expats and more frequently visiting vets can keep it up. But this may be enough for the newbies for whom the Gluch has not lost its initial allure or for the hardest core mongering veterans. who together probably accounts for a sizeable number of us.
Next on the continuum, are the guys who like to do other things but don't like to forego even 1 evening of mongering, which I suspect applies to another sizeable proportion of us. For these guys, as long as all of their nights are free for mongering (and perhaps their late afternoons for MP's) they are reasonably happy. What fills the rest of their time depends on their personal tastes.
Gamblers make up another large subset of this group and that is an activity that holds some draw regardless of how many times you come down.
Sightseers make up another large subset but there one has to get much more creative as one gets more experience in CR. And there can also be a cost factor. Personally I think going on whitewater rafting day trips has a lot of repeat value (for 1 day each trip at least) but like a lot of organized tour activities it can be fairly pricey. SJ itself offers a few sights as has been suggested like the museums (the Museo Nacional is my personal fave), they leave a large part of the day remaining for MP mongering or just hanging out or peoplewatching and they're virtually free, but IMHO, not quite as strog in terms of repeat value.
I think perhaps the best advice for anyone expecting to make many more return visits is to invest one's time in taking Spanish classes. Again, it will cost you some money, but not nearly as much as most organized tours. classes usually start fairly early (for those who were out until 2 the night before or were chicabanging all night), but it will leave your entire afternoon for taking a nap or cruisng the MP's. And in term's of repeat value, no matter at what level you start out, one can always get imprive their language skills and the return value for your mongering effectiveness can not be understated.
The "buses to nowhere" approach is hard to beat in terms of being extremely cheap. If you haven't done the more typical tours, you will probably find those more interesting but also much more expensive, so I suppose which route you choose to go depends as much on your budget and what you feel comfortable spending as anything else. That said I think anyone interested in more than just mongering (and with an adventurous spirit) will eventually want to try out the buses, particularly after trying all the more interesting organized tours and tiring of those. However, I think that even the buses could grow a little old too if you continue to restrict yourself to just the places within an easy ride of SJ (but it will get you through several more trips).
I think I fall on the far other end of the continuum from the hard-core mongers and most other guys around here and I'm not really sure how many other guys share my own position. For me, the mongering is just a very nice bonus on my trip. I go to CR at least as much for its other attractions as I do for the mongering, if not much more so. However, I will confess that the mongering definitely has been a big reason why I've come back to CR as often as I have rather than move on to other newer fresher areas (comfort and familiarity being the other big reasons). Despite what often seems to some newbies as my "expertise" on CR, I definitely defer to the MANY other monger vets who leave me in the dust and are the TRUE Mongering experts. OTOH, I'll hold my knowledge of non-mongering areas further afield from the Gulch against just about anybody. Whenever I travel to CR, I rarely if ever spend more than just a few days in CR (unless I'm taking classes or otherwise productively occupying my time), particularly on my last few trips. There is a lot to see and do in CR even after many trips, despite it being such a relatively small country, but that means not just getting out of the Gulch but also out of the Central Valley and that in turn nearly always means either bringing companionship with you on your longer forays or being prepared to go with out. I've climbed several of the mountains/volcanos around the country but I strongly doubt there would be too many chicas willing to join me on such activities (or mongers who'd be physically up for it either).
This thread can give you many ideas on things to do beyond mongering, but the answers are nearly as numerous as there are mongers and it really comes down to whatever YOU are into.