Where do locals actually go in San José?

Downtown office workers eat lunch at Mercado Central, the covered block between Avenida Central and Avenida 1 off Calle 8, and the counters deep inside are better than anything near the Avenida Central doors. A casado of rice, black beans, sweet maduro plantain and a fried egg costs about ₡3,500 to ₡4,500, which is roughly $8 to $10 at 454 colones to the dollar. The aisles carry cilantro, saddle leather from the tack stalls and frying plantain all at once, and you'll share a stool with a bank clerk in a lanyard. Most stalls close by late afternoon, so the market works for lunch and not for dinner. Keep your phone in a front pocket: the pickpocketing warnings in Wikivoyage's San José safety section apply most in these narrow passages.

If you are staying a month, rent in Barrio Escalante or Barrio Aranjuez, east of downtown. Both have supermarkets, laundromats and the city's best cafe belt for locals. The Feria Verde de Aranjuez runs on Saturday mornings, where growers sell organic produce, sourdough and Tarrazú coffee themselves. Nobody organised it as a nomad meetup, but the Saturday crowd works like one. On weekdays Escalante's Paseo Gastronómico La Luz on Calle 33 is quiet during the day and loud at night, and that is the trade-off of renting there. Cafes along the strip will put up with a laptop on a Tuesday morning, but on Friday evenings the same tables are kept for dinner. If you want to walk to the strip without hearing it, take a flat a block or two north of Avenida 7.

Barrio Amón and Barrio Otoya, north of the centre, are where people drink after work. Stiefel Pub on Avenida 7 is an old house with wooden floors that creak under the Friday crowd, pouring a long list of Costa Rican craft beers, and a pint runs about twice what an Imperial costs at a soda. A couple of blocks away on Calle 15, Café de los Deseos has hand-painted walls and draws a mostly Tico crowd of designers and students. In San Pedro, Calle de la Amargura beside the Universidad de Costa Rica is the student strip, loud and cheap, filling on Thursday nights during term. Leave before midnight. From all three, take an Uber or a licensed red taxi home, because locals avoid the walk back through Amón after 11pm.

On Sunday mornings, families jog the loop at Parque La Sabana, the former airport west of downtown, and five-a-side games run on the dusty pitches next to Estadio Nacional. Bring water: today's 11am reading was 25.4°C under overcast skies with 66% humidity, and October afternoons tend to bring rain. For something louder, head to a Deportivo Saprissa home game at Estadio Ricardo Saprissa Aymá in Tibás, the city's purple-shirted weekly ritual, where the bars on the walk up from the buses start filling two hours before kickoff. Clásico fixtures against Alajuelense sell out early, so buy ahead. We'd sit away from the La Ultra Morada end unless you came for the drums and the flares.