Today was very busy in Costa Rica.  After a team breakfast and a quick introduction on life in Costa Rica by our tour guide Josh, we had some time to tour the capital: San Jose.  Just from walking around for a couple of hours, we were able to notice many differences between a city here and an American city.  For starters, most of the houses did not have numbers on them like they do back in the states.  If you ask someone for directions down here to a specific place, their answer will most likely be a point in a certain direction and an estimate to how far it is.  Our tour guide said that everyone you ask will give you an answer no matter if it’s right or wrong because they like to help one another.  While in the city, we quickly learned that public transportation is heavily used like it is in one of our cities; however, it is much more affordable here in Costa Rica.  This doesn’t just apply to San Jose, but there are a lot of stray dogs in Costa Rica.  Almost everywhere we went so far we have seen a stray dog.  One of the places that we stopped at in the city was the artisan marketplace.  We got to shop around and try to get used to the currency.  For every American dollar, that would equal 500 colones.  Sometimes it’s tough when trying to buy things in American dollars and then receiving colones back in exchange.  You have to make sure they aren’t ripping you off and giving the wrong change because you are a tourist.  After a team lunch in downtown San Jose we were then off to San Ramon.  San Ramon was very different compared to the capital.  Just like everywhere we’ve been so far, the people are very friendly.  Right when we got there, we got to host a basketball clinic for the kids of San Ramon.  At the clinic, we showed the kids how to dribble, shoot, pass, defend, and rebound (amongst some other things.)  The toughest challenge that we faced was the language barrier between us and the kids.  Most of our teachings had to come through demonstrations since they had no idea what we were saying other than some basic basketball words that we learned in Spanish before we got there.  The clinic was a great experience and we all had fun helping children learn the game of basketball where normally they wouldn’t be able to do those things.  After the clinic, we got a quick tour of downtown San Ramon before our 7 o’ clock game against Coopanae Universidad de San Jose – San Ramon, the best Pro club team in Costa Rica.  They were last year’s champions for their Pro league.  After a slow start to the game, we fell behind by as much as 19 points during the game.  We cut the lead down to 11 points at halftime.  After some adjustments in the second half we were able to tie the game in the 4^th quarter.  We came back to win the game 64-63.  Today was a great day, from San Jose to coaching the clinic, and to top it off with a great win against a good international team.  It’s a great day to be a Hound.