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

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 Ram�n just after I arrived in Costa Rica, and I�m merely using it for deliciously illustrative purposes).