Moving on..

Our "plan" was to get up really early and catch a bus back to David where we would catch the express bus to San Jose. We figured we could make it by 4pm to meet our friends in town. Hahahaha!
We waited for about 2 1/2 hours for a bus to stop for us (they were full again). We missed the one express bus for the day, so we had to bus it to the Costa Rican border to wait for another bus. We met a nice couple from Arizona on the ride there.
The border crossing was very chaotic, I think it was designed to be confusing. There was a group of kids waiting to direct us to the proper windows to get our passports stamped. They were all over us trying to help us with the forms and everything. A good way to make a buck. The ticketing place for the bus we needed was hidden around the corner from a pile of rubble in a building that looked like it should have been condemned, we never would have found it on our own. There was a friendly guy who helped us figure that out as well. He seemed like a character out of a movie. He looked pretty down and out and we figured that he was an American as he spoke fluent English with no accent, but he was very upbeat and seemed pretty happy and friendly, We wondered what his story was and why he landed at the border.
The next bus to San Jose wasn't scheduled to arrive until 4:30pm so we had to hang at the border for several hours. A concerned grandmotherly woman who we bought some toast and coffee from spent several minutes trying to explain to us the bus station in San Jose (at which we were scheduled to arrive at about 1 AM) was very dangerous. The guidebook said the same thing so we weren't sure what to expect when we got there.
It was another long bus ride (about 8 hours). We didn't get air conditioning or movies this time, but it wasn't too horrible. When we got to the bus station we grabbed a cab and headed to a hotel we found in the Lonely Planet. It was called the Nueve Johnson and the guidebook said "if this is the new Johnson we shudder to think of what the old Johnson was like". This place was nasty. We chose it because it was cheap and close to the bus we needed the next morning. The neighborhood was sketchy, there were prostitutes on the corners and a lot of creepy looking buildings. Not somewhere you'd want to walk around at night. The hotel itself seemed somewhat secure as the entrance was behind a couple of layers of bars (they buzzed you in). The rooms were really dingy, the floors were coated with what looked like a years worth of dirt, and the sheets had some holes in them and didn't look clean, This was the first time we whipped out the clean sheets we brought with us. We waited to shower until morning as we thought we'd need it after a night in this place. luckily the shower was the one place that wasn't too dirty.