The ladybug continues the recollection

Hi again!

Okay, where did I leave you last....the fifth of July was pretty uneventful. We drove all day to a town called Monteverde. Monteverde, Costa Rica is the most beautiful mountain town I have ever seen in my life. From the main road alone it takes an hour and a half to drive up there, through the mountains, on dirt roads the whole way. We arrived around midday and I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the small town, eating typical Costa Rican food, and enjoying the nice weather. In the evening we all went to Alejandro´s coffee shop to enjoy coffee and we participated in the warm fuzzy activity that I suggested because of high tensions in the group. I did this in 6^th grade home ec class, and it is when there is a piece of paper for everyone in the group that gets passed around and everyone writes something nice about each other anonymously. It was very pleasant. We then went back to the hotel and I finished reading the coffee book for our class (which we haven´t talked about at all, I am not even sure if we are going to use it, but it was nice reading anyway).

The next day we went to two farms before going to Alejandro´s. The first one was an all organic farmer who believes passionately in only farming organically. His family has owned the farm for three generations, and they originally farmed the land organically and with shade. However, in the Green Revolution of the 1950s, his family was forced by the Costa Rican government to change to clear cutting the land and using chemicals. After 20 or so years the land became useless because of all of the chemicals, so he started to change the farm back to being organic and shade grown. Now, after 11 years of officially farming organically and shade grown, he believes the farm has an entirely different feel to it. It feels more alive to him because it thrives with bird life, and he says that the farm just breathes differently. Also, he has experimented a lot with organic fertilizers and insecticides. He has even concocted a completely organic insecticide to kill a leaf rot that is common to coffee. He has run into many issues with the co-op he is a member of because they do not believe that organic farming is profitable. Although his yield is better than some of the conventional farms we have visited, organic farming is still viewed with high skepticism. Even when he developed the all natural fungi insecticide, the co-op refuses to believe that he did not use chemicals.

After visiting this farm we went to a conventional farm which has been running for 60 years. It was pretty, and I almost died from a snake. Kidding. What really happened was I was taking a picture of a flower close up to the ground when I realized I was taking a picture of a snake! A farmer who was near me saw it and promptly killed it with a nearby stick. Lucky for me it did not get close to me- on closer inspection of the dead snake we realized it was a lethal coral snake. The red with small yellow and black stripes snake that you occasionally see drop on people in movies about jungle adventures. Fun stuff.

Anyway, now for the craziness.

After the farm trips we then went straight to Alejandro´s family farm. It was so beautiful up there! They had some cows around (most were out grazing), a few horses, and chickens running everywhere. Here is where the craziness starts: in Costa Rican culture, it is a big event to invite friends and guests over to kill a pig and eat it. So that is what we did. We were invited over, we killed a pig, and we ate it. The killing of the pig was an interesting event, but to my surprise, I was not disgusted or shocked. It looked really natural to me. Weird, eh? We then skinned off the hair by using boiling water and knives, I have pictures to prove I partook. Then we watched Alejandro´s brother gut the pig (which smelled pretty bad) and then the meat was sliced. The meat takes a while to cook, so while we waited some of us went to the tillapia pond to catch some fish. The mountains surrounding Monteverde are incredibly steep and incredibly green, so hiking down to the pond was both beautiful and really muddy and difficult. But, fishing was fun, they have this human-made pond filled with fish that they catch using a net. We only were able to catch 3 that were big enough to eat, but I caught 2 of them! By the time we got back up the really steep hill the pig fat was cooked into chicharrones, which is a local Costa Rican food that everyone in this world must eat sometime. Then, the rest of the pig was roasted on a bar-b-que grill and we ate it with rice and beans. We also drank this crazy Costa Rican moonshine called contrabando, because it is now contraband due to its intensity. It was okay. A little sketch considering we drank it out of a gasoline can. I did not drink that much but a lot of people did, and they were pretty crazy. I had a lot of fun hanging out with Alejandro´s niece who was super sweet and the cutest little girl ever.

After all that we finally went home and I fell asleep pretty quickly. Ok, tired of typing, I´m going back to the hammock to read.

Catching up is tedious! I will get all the way caught up very shortly, I promise.

Love,

Ceci