Nothing Beats the Heat and Cures Bereavement Like a Nice, Cool Sno-Cone!

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The rainy season—or “green season,” as the marketing geniuses at the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism call it—is now in full swing down here in Coast Tasty, but recently there was an uncharacteristically hot and sunny day. On that day I was driving through Palmares to get to work, and I passed by a cemetery. Traffic was backed up because there were a ton of people on the side of the road.

These type of minor traffic jams always happen around here, usually because drivers can’t resist slowing down to check out what might turn out to be a terrifically horrid traffic accident. But this time, the rubberneckers were surely disappointed, because the crowd on the side of the road was mobbing together for a different reason. As the mourners were leaving a funeral service, they were all stopping to buy granizados—which are basically sno-cones topped with powdered milk and condensed milk–from a grizzled old man with a bike-mounted cart, which he had conveniently parked at the front gate to the cemetery.

Having traffic get held up for such an absurd reason would have normally caused me to go half-berserk and curse repeatedly to myself, but on this hot day, I could only smile and wonder at the marketing genius of this slightly morbid vendor.


(By the way, the guy in the picture above is not the actual old man I just mentioned; I took this picture at a festival in San Ramón just after I arrived in Costa Rica, and I’m merely using it for deliciously illustrative purposes).


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Sitzman

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2 thoughts on “Nothing Beats the Heat and Cures Bereavement Like a Nice, Cool Sno-Cone!”

  1. Oh, copos are the best! I have flasbacks of a 9 year old Angie eating a copo with her grandma in Puntarenas. Good times!

  2. (Note from the Sitzblog management– Angie’s copo-related “flashback” is actually an acid flashback. She didn’t have a grandma, and she’s never been to Puntarenas. Also, she was never 9… she went directly from being 8 to being 10, due to yet another typical Costa Rican clerical error.
    Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused while viewing Sitzblog.)

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