by Rod Hughes

June came and went without the 10 dry days that normally happen, the so-called Veranillo de San Juan. Litterally translated, this is “the Little Summer of St. John.” But the little summer seems to have been canceled, either for lack of interest or because St. John took a vacation.

Nor is it going to get drier this week. The daily newspaper Al Dia reports that a tropical depression is expected to send us even more precipitation and has already hit the northern sector of the country as well as the Caribbean.

By midday today, it will cover the Central Valley and creep down to the Central Pacific, bringing varied intensity of showers. The Meteorology Institute warned residents to watch ditches and rivers for flash floods.

by Rod Hughes

As the continued rise in petroleum prices threatens to imbalance Costa Rica’s foreign exchange, the government would like nothing better than for Ticos to think more about dumping their SUVs in favor of a hybrid car. Purdy Motors is all for that.

Purdy, a longtime fixture in the national motoring scene, is the only Costa Rican importer who had the foresight to bring in hybrid cars, notes an exclusive business story in the weekly The Tico Times. So you can have any kind of hybrid here as long as it is a Toyota Prius. From Purdy Motors.

Although Purdy has been importing the Prius since 2004, only about a hundred hybrids cruise the country so far, according to the importer’s marketing manager, Luis Mastroeni. One of the measures the Ministry of Energy and Environment has urged to cut imports of expensive petroleum are hybrids and electric cars. Mastroeni claims that Purdy is the only dealer in all of Latin America to see the handwriting on the wall and pay attention to hybrids.

Environment Minister Roberto Dobles would like further tax breaks on hybrids. Even now, the Prius buyer pays only a 34% Selective Consumption Tax as opposed to 52% for other vehicles. Still, Tico Times reporter Leslie Friday questioned whether many Ticos would pick up the Prius’s rather hefty price tag of $36,700.

Although the paper says that Dobles is interested in electric cars and thinks the nation’s electric grid can handle the extra load, no importer has yet to jump at the opportunity.

In other pretroleum crisis news, 60 heavy cargo trucks held a slowdown on the roads between Alajuela and Paseo Colon in San Jose to protest rising fuel prices, causing traffic jams that effected the entire metropolitan area. What the drivers of these semi-truck-trailers hoped to gain by blocking traffic, other than to inconvenience their fellow citizens, is hard to imagine. Certainly the government has no hold over OPEC and is, indeed, as concrned about the situation as anyone else.

by Rod Hughes

News you would never know unless you read The Tico Times Weekend section: In a dispatch datelined “Paris,” written by Caroline Vu Nguyen run recently in Central America’s leading English-language newspaper, readers learned that Costa Rican abstract artist Ana Wien is the newest toast of the Paris art world.

In the group show by the artist group, Artists & Life, that ended on June 28, her bright tropical colors were featured in four prominently displayed paintings that drew immediate attention, the paper reported. She also displayed her works in 2006 at the group’s first show at the prestigious Grande Arche de ka Defense building and later went on to the Galerie Figure in Paris’s posh Sixth District.

Indeed, she made a world-wide splash in 2005, gaining an honorable mention at Miami’s Women in Arts show and earning a second place in New York’s International Art Festival. In an interview with Nguyen, Wien acted still star-struck with the vitality of France’s love of art, noting that in a non-descript galerie near her hotel in Paris she found no fewer than three Chagals hanging.

She studied under famous Costa Rican artists Manuel de la Cruz Gonzalez and Francisco Amighetti. She said her emphasis on warm colors comes from the teachings of de la Cruz.