Costa Rica Blogging: Karaoke in Miramar Puntarenas

Last Friday night I had my first taste of a Spanish country music bar here in Miramar, Puntarenas where I live. Miramar is a small town, that in itself has little of interest for most tourists. However, it is an o.k. home-base if you are visiting nearby places like Adventure Park Costa Rica, the port city of Puntarenas, or just want to get a real taste of day-to-day life for most Costa Ricans.

The bar we went to, at our friend's suggestion, was called Happy Land (see pics below). My first impression on walking into the bar, however, was not exactly happiness. There were a few locals at the bar area and a couple white plastic tables with matching chairs to the right. We put two of the tables together for our group of eight. The bars in this area of Costa Rica are all open-air (which can make them quite hot on humid nights). The doors at Happy Land remain open, which allowed for the stray street dog or two to wander in and out at leisure (see one of these canine visitors in the pic below).

Happy Land bar in Miramar is considered a "country" bar, in the sense that it's the simple country and agricultural folk that you will most likely see frequenting it. The music is all in Spanish, and the karaoke choices were all Mexican type ballads. As you can imagine, there was no way I was going to attempt to sing one of those ballads, although my boyfriend and his friends did take a stab at it. Costa Ricans are fanatics of Mexican music which I find quite interesting since in my native country of Panama (right next door), I have not found this to be the case.

At the end of the night, Happy Land Bar picked up a bit. In between karaoke sets, the DJ played some Spanish dance music. The karaoke experts in our group seemed to really like the ambience and offerings at Happy Land, so if you are into slow Mexican love songs and ballads it might make for an interesting night for you too.