Around 11 pm on Friday, November 1, the first direct flight with JetBlue from New York landed at the Juan Santamaría International Airport. This inaugural flight marks the start of the route from the American low-cost airline.

The direct flights will be on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays every week on an Airbus A320 that fits 150 passengers. They leave from the John F. Kennedy Airport at 6:25 pm and 11:59 pm. The flight takes approximately four hours.

Although we initially thought that “Pura Vida” was a Costa Rica advertising slogan, it really is an expression that Costa Ricans use to greet, thank and, surely, many other occasions that we still do not know..

But it is also much more than that. They are two words that define the attitude of a country. And although, sometimes, they do not fit with the harsh reality (I remember now the drunks of Playa del Coco, for example) on many other occasions, Costa Rica shows you precisely this: Pura Vida.