Happy Father's Day! (plus tours)

Happy Father's Day!

To all dads and grandfathers out there, but especially to mine.  I love you both and I'm sorry I'm not there to celebrate today.  I hope you have an excellent day (with lots of good naps 😊).

We've finished most of our formal training at this point (we = Marisa and I, my roommate and the other new naturalist).  We are by no means ready to lead activities just yet, but we've at least seen most of them.  In the coming weeks, we'll continue to shadow other naturalists until we're ready to lead groups solo.  

The other day I got to go on two tours for the first time: one of San Luis, the town in which UGA is located, and one of a local coffee farm/processing area.  Martha, the head naturalist here and our coordinator, drove Marisa and me around town to see everything.  The coffee tour was led by the people who grow and process the coffee and translated by James, one of the other naturalists. 

Things I learned during the San Luis tour:

• San Luis the town contains three different neighborhoods/areas: Alto San Luis, Bajo San Luis, and Invu
• A town in Costa Rica is a town if it contains three things: a church, a primary school, and a soccer field
• Hurricane Nate came through this region last fall and caused a lot of damage, the results of which can still be seen

During the tour Martha pointed out different buildings/homes in this area that we'll need to know.  I mentioned in my last post that naturalists are responsible for home stay drop offs, so our map shows us not only the roads and town buildings but also who lives in which house.  We translate for tours of the coffee farms nearby, so we saw those.  Guests staying at UGA can sign up for cooking classes and to have dinner with a local family, so Martha pointed out the homes that usually host those too. 

The vegetation used to come a lot closer to the stream before the storm

Primary school in Alto San Luis

An entrance to the Sendero Pacifico right down the road from campus

The view while driving around

A more extreme example of the effects from the storm last year

Coffee processing plant

San Luis Community Center.  Town meetings are held here, there's a very small library, and Martha teaches Zumba classes twice a week!

We still had time before we had to be back to campus after seeing much of San Luis, so we continued through Monteverde (one of the bigger towns nearby, with restaurants and hotels) into Santa Elena (another bigger town nearby; also has restaurants, hotels and shops).

View on the way into Santa Elena.  Apparently sunsets here during the dry season are incredible (too cloudy/likely to be raining here during this season)

Mall in town!

Do the people in those "stock photos" look familiar?

Appropriate for today: Happy Father's Day!

View on the way back to UGA

Fun fact: the drive for this tour was so bumpy that my Fitbit tracked ~9000 steps by the time we were done, and I had done barely any other walking during the day.

Later in the day, we shadowed James as he translated a coffee tour of Eliza's farm.

Coffee plants -- Eliza's farm has ~1200 plants

Eliza talking to the group in front of sugar cane

A trapiche, used for processing sugar cane 

The pitcher has the juice that came out of the trapiche from the sugar cane.  The bottle of dark liquid contains sugar cane syrup, the next step in processing the sugar cane.  They call this liquid miel here, which translates to honey (even though it's not actually honey).  The cake/block looking thing with a knife on top is a tapa de dulce, the final processing step.  It's basically a block of cane sugar that can be used in recipes/anywhere you'd use a sweetener. 

Eliza sells her coffee beans to another family in the area.  After visiting her farm, we visited Oldemar's home, where the coffee is processed.

The various stages of coffee processing: the red coffee bean (or cherry), the seeds from inside the fruit (the yellowish pieces), grano de oro (the smaller pieces next to the yellowish ones, literally translates to "golden grain") and the finished coffee beans.  Oldemar sells medium and dark roast coffees, the only difference between which is that the dark roast beans are roasted for an extra five minutes. 

Basically a giant mortar and pestle used to separate the outer layer to get to the grano de oro

Oldemar invited us into his home to try the coffee.  I figured if there was ever a place I would enjoy coffee, it would be there where it had been freshly made from beans picked in the neighborhood and processed right there.
...I still didn't like it   

It was really cool to get to see more of San Luis with a map and have a better idea of where I was.  I also really enjoyed getting a glimpse of the processes that happen here to get some of the items we consume. 

I hope everyone had a good weekend!

Bonus photo: There were empanadas for lunch the other day, which everyone was excited for.  I was too, until I saw there were only cheese and meat options.  When I got my food, the women who work in the kitchen told me they had bean empanadas for me. So I went back into the kitchen and they'd made me two bean empanadas that were delicious and made me so happy :)