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Architectural award goes
to Puntarenas building

A wood-frame structure in Puntarenas is the winner of this years architectural restoration award by the Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes.

The owners will get 30 million colons, about $64,000, to help with the project.

The building is Casa Fait, which is on the north side of Parque Victoria in the center of Puntarenas. The structure is on about 1,000 square meters of land. Three families live on the second floor of the structure now, and the work to remodel the building will create space for shops on the first floor and perhaps an art shop or a restaurant, said the proposal that was advanced by architects.

The designers of the remodeling effort that won the award are architects Gerardo Chavarría Peña and Carlos Mesén Rees plus Francisco Enríquez Solano.

The contest is designed to help with the restoration of historically significant properties in Costa Rica. More than 20 projects were advanced to participate in this year’s contest.

Proposals came from all over the country. The winner was announced Thursday.

The contest, called Salvemos Nuestro Patrimonio Arquitectónico in Spanish, has been providing money for restoration efforts since 1997.

Municipality gets deadline
to pick up old garbage

The environmental ministry has give the municipality of Montes de Oca 24 hours to get the garbage picked up.

The municipality, best known for being the location for the University of Costa Rica, has had mechanical problems with the bulk of its garbage fleet. Streets are overflowing with garbage, most of it in plastic bags.

The Tribunal Ambiental of the Ministerio de Ambiente y Energía said late Thursday that it was opening an investigation of the situation.

It ordered the regidores or council members of the municipality and the mayor to come up with an effective solution within 24 hours  in order to avoid irreparable damage to the health of the residents.

River cleanup planned 
Saturday at Barranca

More than 250 persons, most of them students, will be at the mouth of the Río Barranca near Puntarenas Saturday for a major cleanup.

The Ministerio de Educación Pública is sponsoring the event along with Florida Bebidas and the Asociación Terra Nostra. In addition to students, Scouts will be involved.

Not only will the trash be picked up between the river and Chacarita de Puntarenas but anything that can be recycled will be, organizers said.

The effort is in commemoration of Earth Day, which was April 22.

Many of the participants are from the region, but students from the Central Valley are scheduled to be there, too, because much of the waste comes from the densely populated metropolitan area.

The organizations plan similar events this year at playas Tárcoles, Agujas and Sámara and at the mouth of the Río Pacuare, said organizers.

U.N. agency to compete
in money-transfer field

The United Nations postal agency wants to compete in the money transfer business.

Although the agency stresses that the plan will be good for migrant workers to send money back home, the project seems to provide another option for anyone who has to send money from one country to another.

The U.N. said reliable electronic transfers would eliminate the paper and manual work now involved with traditional postal money orders.

Universal Postal Union Director-General Edouard Dayan told a forum in The Hague, Netherlands this week of his agency’s new link with Eurogiro, whose membership girdles the globe.

The two organizations have developed a gateway connecting their networks for the transmission of the Tele Money Order. Selected postal administrations will soon start testing the new service, with a view to rolling it out by the end of May. 

The service is open to all, but migrants are expected to be major beneficiaries. 

Some 30 postal administrations, both in industrialized and developing countries, take advantage of the postal union’s International Financial System software using electronic data interchange to send money order data, while nearly 50 postal agencies and banks use Eurogiro for cash and account transfers. 

The new Tele Money Order will enable postal officials and potentially banks using either system to perform electronic fund transfers with each other, widely extending the reach of this service across the world. 

"With a well-established worldwide network of more than 660,000 offices, Posts can offer a service that is both accessible and affordable to everyone," Dayan said, noting that fund transfers are the second most important financing source for developing countries after direct investment. 

 "None in Atenas (Athens) or Grecia (Greece)?" I asked. 

"None," I was told.

 So off I went on my virtual Oddesey to Mediterranean restaurants galore. An occasional Greek salad or cucumbers in yogurt (tsatziki) were all that I could find. I tried Ambrosia with all its dishes named for Greek gods and goddesses. Only the names were Greek. 

But, oh happy day, I found exactly what I was looking for, an affordable place with hearty basic Greek blue collar food. Refined cooking with elegant touches is common in upscale Athens restaurants, but the courses seem to lose their soul when they get too extravagant, in my humble opinion. 

Although the dishes may be fabulous, they seem less pure Hellenic and more international. Food gorgies in the name of Dionysus often become pan Mediterranean with Middle Eastern overtones. In Greece, the elements of good taverna food are straight forward: tender lamb, fresh seafood, beef, chicken, cheese, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, great olives, juicy tomatoes, sweet onions and peppers, rice, potatoes, pasta, pita bread, lemons, oregano, garlic, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, rosemary, dill, salt and pepper and filo desserts with strong Greek coffee.

Some 400 meters up the hill past the Costa Rican Country Club on the other side of the street sits Bouzouki Greek Café, named after the stringed mandolin-like instrument depicted over the entrance. The colors outside and in are the blue and white of the Greek flag. 

Tablecloths are blue and white checked. The walls are white-washed stucco and deep blue flat surfaces. The ceiling is black fabric. An active little bar and room for diners who smoke are inside the door. The bar is well stocked and you can get uzo or turpentine-like retsina. If you want a pleasant wine from Greece with no pine needle aftertaste, try the Alexander white. 

To the rear, a smoke-free dining room is dressed to look like a courtyard on an Aegean island. Wall coverings look like an outside door and windows with wrought iron flower (ivy) boxes. The music is Greek, much of it played on a bouzouki. It makes for a very informal, quaint and cozy space.

The handsome couple who own Bouzouki are a robust young man with a bountiful black beard from Zambia via Canada, Tak, and his very gracious Tica wife Katia. Her family has a bakery. His Greek parents had a popular  restaurant in Vancouver and Bouzouki uses his mom’s recipes. They are basic traditional taverna style, well executed. 

She flew in from Vancouver before the opening to check that they were all properly executed. The menu is short, four soups, nine appetizers, seven main courses and four desserts. Portions are large. Prices are quite reasonable.

Dr. Lenny Karpman On  the  food we eat

On our first visit, we ordered three appetizers and only one main course, in an attempt to taste more of their renditions of our old favorites. The egg lemon soup was a regional variant, from, I believe, Epirus. It tasted of lemon, but instead of a silky smooth chicken broth, yellow from many egg yolks, it was gray, thick as rice porridge and loaded with barrel-shaped rice laden meatballs, different from the norm, but very tasty and filling (¢1,700). Its specific name from the Greek is meat-rice barrel egg lemon soup (yuvarelakia soupa avgolemono).

Boca-size chicken souvlaki was large enough for a main course. The tender white meat chicken pieces were tossed in a yogurt and herb sauce and wrapped with an oregano and pepper seasoned salad in a large warm pita (¢1,700). The spanakopita, filo-encased spinach pie, seasoned simply with oregano and black pepper, was also very large and shared a plate with Greek salad (¢1,700). The main course-size mousaka (¢3,300) consisted of a large platter with a generous square of meat pie, rice, roast potatoes and a larger helping of salad. 

The pie itself had a bottom layer of sliced potatoes, a second layer of roasted eggplant, a third thick layer of ground beef that tasted as if it were seasoned expertly with cinnamon, oregano and clove along with salt and pepper, and a topping of golden brown baked bechamel sauce. The salad was lettuce, tomato, onion, radish, red pepper, and Kalamata olives in a lemon vinagrette.

Ouzo cake (¢1,350) and almond cookies topped with icing sugar (¢200 each) completed a scrumptious meal that could easily have fed the two of us plus another hungry adult. [At this writing, the colon is 469 to the U.S. dollar]

On our next visit, we shared white bean soup in a tomato base with oregano and black pepper (¢1,300), Greek-style little meatballs, keftedes, with a tsatziki dipping sauce small pitas and a bevy of luscious olives (¢1,250). Next came a Greek ham and feta cheese sandwich on a pita loaf with the same yogurt sauce, lettuce, tomato and oven roasted potatoes on the side (¢1,000). Greek coffee and homemade baklava (¢1,450) made for a happy ending.

Hearty authentic taverna food in a comfy informal place run by nice people: ´´ - ´´´, $-$$ ( only the steak is more than ¢3,750)

The Organization of American States said it is concerned by the situations in Nicaragua and Belize.

Acting OAS Secretary-General Luigi Einaudi condemned violence in Nicaragua and urged all political and social forces in the country to resolve their "socio-economic and political differences" peacefully and quickly.

Nicaragua's capital city of Managua has experienced a week of street protests that left several dozen people injured and more than 100 arrested. The protests have been described as the country's worst turmoil in more than five years.

The U.S. State Department issued a public announcement last week alerting Americans to continuing civil unrest and potentially violent demonstrations in Nicaragua.

A recent price increase in public transportation fares resulted in numerous protests by students in Nicaragua, with bus and taxi drivers demonstrating in support of the increased fares. The demonstrations in Nicaragua, 

Einaudi said the hemispheric organization is expressing its "full and decisive support" for the government of Belize led by Prime Minister Said Musa and for the country's democratic institutions.

A resolution condemned the use of violence and any actions that threaten democracy, governance, and the rule of law in Belize.

Teachers in Belize walked off the job Tuesday in support of telephone workers who are in a dispute with the government. Protesters have sabotaged telephone lines and disrupted electrical service in large areas of the country. 

Lisa Shoman, Belize's ambassador to the OAS, told the inter-American body that the interruption of electrical and telecommunication services in her country has resulted in millions of dollars in economic losses to both the public and private sectors.

SANTIAGO, Chile — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday it is the historic duty of the world's democracies to eliminate political tyranny. She addressed officials from more than 100 countries at the Community of Democracies meeting in Santiago.

Ms. Rice has made the promotion of democracy and free-market economics the theme of her current four-nation trip to South America, her first since taking office. 

And in her address to the Community of Democracies, she said the world's democrats should strive for nothing less than the end of dictatorial rule: "Every nation in this room has experienced moments of tyranny in its history, some long ago, some very recently. Today our citizens share the common bond of having overcome tyranny through our commitment to freedom and democracy. Now, it is our historic duty to tell the world that tyranny is a crime of man, not a fact of nature. Our goal must always be the elimination of tyranny in our world," she said.

The Community of Democracies is an informal grouping founded in 2000 to improve and advance democratic governance.

Ms. Rice said the selection of Chile for the group's third ministerial meeting was a fitting choice, given what she said was that country's triumphant return to democracy after a 1973 military coup.

The United States is widely believed to have instigated the 1973 coup which led to the death of democratically elected Salvador Allende.

In her address, the Secretary of State endorsed a Hungarian proposal to host a Democracy Transition 

She also urged support for the creation of what she termed a legitimate human rights body within the United Nations.

The Bush administration has been critical of the existing U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which earlier this week awarded seats to countries widely accused of human rights violations including Zimbabwe, China and Sudan.

Ms. Rice began her Santiago visit with a meeting with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos that covered, among other things, Chilean-led peacekeeping efforts in Haiti, recent political unrest in Ecuador and Bolivia, and the deadlocked contest between Mexican and Chilean candidates to be the next secretary-general of the Organization of American States.

The United States has backed the candidacy of Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez, though in a joint press appearance with Mr. Lagos, Ms. Rice also praised the Chilean contender, Interior Minister Jose Miguel Insulza, and said she hopes for a solution that preserves O.A.S. unity.

For his part, President Lagos said he agreed that both men are excellent leaders and said there should be no north-south or ideological confrontation within the OAS. 

He said it is important to look for what he termed other consensus mechanisms to end the impasse but did not elaborate.

OAS ministers convene at the organization's headquarters in Washington Monday for another attempt to resolve the issue.

The U.S. National Football League is gaining exposure in Mexico.  The league's NFL Network agreed to a multiyear television deal Thursday with Sky Mexico.  The country's largest pay-TV service will show NFL Network programming beginning Sunday. Sky Mexico serves over one million subscribers.

The NFL will play its first regular-season game outside 

The NFL is seeking new fans in Mexico as it tries to build global interest in American-style professional football.

The game will be played at Azteca Stadium, where an NFL record 112,376 fans attended a 1994 game.