Even though I take the public bus every day, I am still confused by the Costa Rican public transportation system. One of the most difficult things is la hora tica (Costa Rican time). In Costa Rica, everything seems to run anywhere from 15 minutes to 40 minutes late! When trying to take the morning bus to school, this has proven to be my biggest challenge. Every morning at 7:00 a.m., I wait for the morning bus to come by to take me to the university. Even though my host family told me that the bus passes every morning “around 7:00 a.m.”, I find that the bus is late almost every day. It usually arrives at 7:25 a.m. Because of this, I am usually late for classes. In addition to the bus usually being late, the bus stops are not marked, so it can be confusing to choose the right bus to get on. One day, while waiting at the central bus stop in the park when I was trying to get home from school, I took the wrong bus. At that stop, more than 15 different buses pass by, and each one looks the same, the only difference being a small sign in the front window of each bus displaying the name of locations where the bus goes. Sometimes the buses do not even have signs or they are too small for me to read. On this occasion, I accidentally took the bus to a different town! Instead of getting off the bus at the other town, I stayed on the bus for two hours until it brought me back to my original spot, waited another 45 minutes for my bus, and sat on that bus for 30 minutes just to get home from school.
