A Trip to the CATIE (pronounced: ka-tee-A)

Center for academic excellence, technical cooperation and research. It has

dedicated its efforts to improve the standard of living of rural families in the American tropics, while embracing a holistic vision of human activity and its environment. Today, CATIE has become a leading regional center that is both dynamic and committed to rural development. These qualities have allowed it to expand its geographic scope and have earned it regional and international recognition.

Click Here to see CATIE's website

Yesterday on a beautiful hot day, Berto didn't have class (and Juan and Tammy worked) so he was my tour guide. I packed ham sandwiches and some kool-aid and we got to borrow Tammy's nice camera. When Berto showed up at the house, Doña, Tammy, and pretty much everyone else said, "Oh! Did you call each other this morning to decide what you were going to wear?" You'll see in pictures...

We walked about 30 minutes to get to the CATIE. There are botanical gardens, a lake, and a park. The walk alone provided many beautiful sights...bright colored flowers, mountains, different kinds of trees and wildlife.

Above: a painting in English on the side of a school building: "Spaces full of art and music, make our world a place of expression" I love all the colors and the view! Is this Heaven because it sure isn't Iowa. (Field of Dreams, anyone?)

 Eating my sandwich...

You can almost hear how peaceful it is...


Wheeeere's the bird?

Chasing a bird...haha

Main building at the CATIE

Lovely tree!

 I was walking around a tree through a cob web when I thought I'd rather not break through this one. So I walked around the tree to the other side and almost walked into....THIS. In MN no big deal, I walk through cob webs all the time, but do you see THIS! on them? It was probably as big as  both of my hands put together. Ok, I may have screamed and ran away a little.

This plant I am holding is coming off of one stem. Huge! As big as my upper body. I also thought it looked like hair.

Another type of flower. Looks like a honey comb maybe? I believe they are called maracas. They look like those too.

< Same outfit. Documented.

A pretty flower at Berto's house.

This decoration on the fridge says "God bless my home".

After the walk back, we walked to Berto's house because his mom was making us spaghetti! He asked if I like spaghetti. And I said of course, I'm Italian. This spaghetti though, delicious, made with tomato sauce, smoked tuna, cilantro, mushrooms (?), and queso fresco. 

 Hey, Mom! It's a cocao tree. They grow them inside their house. I told them you would be jealous.

Below, are Berto's mom (Jenny bc it was easiest), dad (Sergio), and grandma. His mom teaches little kids at the church and his dad used to work in the big building at the CATIE as an accountant. 

In this picture we are having coffee, which is traditionally offered when you have guests over. Before you even offer water or food you offer coffee. So we also were treated to Pejiballe, a small fruit very dry and strong in flavor. Smaller than my palm. It is bright yellow on the inside. We ate it with either sour cream (natilla) or cream cheese (queso crema). It's really good for you because it has a lot of fiber. And we also had cornbread, bread with either cheese, pineapple marmalade, and biscotela (a kind of cookie). They also cut up some of their sugar cane for me to chew on and try the juice! I was spoiled.

Below, a picture of Berto's parents singing me a song that they used to sing for Berto and his sister when they were younger, it's called Los Pollitos, little baby chicks. I will include a page on the side of my blog for the lyrics and song to Los Pollitos. They printed me a copy of the lyrics, and I think I will use it one day in my classroom!

 <Pejiballes

Here is a nighttime view of Turrialba. We drove only about halfway up the hill to see this. Much darker than what I'm used to in the States. There is a lot of empty dark spaces that light doesn't reach, making it seem like some areas are just little candles flickering. The stars were so plentiful some parts of the sky almost looked white.

Fresh Chicken Soup!

Machetes and Marching Ants
One of my concerns before my trip was what-the-H am I going to do when Tammy and Juan are at work? I'm still fresh in the culture, still learning the language, still learning my way around, etc. Well! The past couple of days I have helped Doña Marten outside in the yard. Yesterday, we cut long grass with machetes, working and talking, maybe a little more talking than working, but with two of us we kept each other company and got the work done a lot faster! We wore hats, long sleeve button up shirts, rain boots, and gloves. I kneeled in a pile of pig poo, and when I told Doña Marten about it, she warned me not to put my knees on the ground because the ants will crawl all over me and bite me! I've gotten bit a couple times by the ants, not pleasant! I started pulling some of the weeds with my gloves, and I had ants crawling all over my gloves. So I stuck to the machete...

Quick Love Story
So she told me the story of how she and her husband met and got married. They got engaged after three months of dating! He was in the peace corps and she owned a grocery store with her sister. Their grocery store was the only store that had an international phone, so he came in there almost everyday to make calls and to see her. He wrote her a letter once, when he was still learning English, will you be my girlfriend? She said no. He wrote her another letter asking the same thing, and she said no. Finally he wrote a third letter saying, "I don't want to bother you, but this is the last time I will ask you if you want to be my girlfriend." They got engaged so she could go to the United States with him and told her parents by showing them a wedding invitation!

Bananas & Fresh Chicken Soup
Yesterday was cutting the grass, today I learned how to cut bananas down from a tree and kill a chicken. We used a machete to cut down the whole trunk of the section of bananas we were cutting down. Apparently, after a bunch of bananas has grown, the tree itself is dead. So you cut at the trunk until it falls over and you can reach the top of the banana bunch with your machete. Also, the juice inside the banana tree stains a really bad brown color so definitely don't want to get it on you! Did you know banana trees had flowers? Me neither. They are really big and purple and hang upside down under the bottom of the banana bunch.

Joke: What was Beethoven's favorite fruit?
-Ba-na-na-na (Beethovens 5th? eh? eh?)

After we got the bananas, it was time to start making lunch...chicken soup! I'm glad for this experience, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to like chicken after today, we will see when lunch time comes around...BEWARE! DON'T KEEP READING UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO KILL A CHICKEN!!

Here it is, How to Kill a Chicken
      So we had a gallina tied up until we had washed all of the surfaces in the outdoor kitchen and prepared a space for us to get it done. She was already boiling water over their wood burning stove. Then, she took a rag and tied it around the chicken's feet so she could hold it upside down. She took a long skinny piece of wood, laid it across the chicken's neck and stepped on both sides of the wood, a.k.a. suffocating it. Then she twisted its neck and twisted its neck until it was over, the whole time saying "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, poor little chicken."
      Next we hung the chicken upside down for a few minutes so the blood would drain to the head. Then, we put it in a big bowl, poured the boiling water over it, let it soak a few minutes to make plucking the feathers off much easier. (I helped with this part!) We plucked all the feathers off, then held the chicken over the fire. This, she explained, made it easier for taking off the skin of the feet. So we slid off the scaly skin part (is anybody still reading by this point?!) and tossed it into a container with the stuff we were either not going to use or give to the dogs. Then, the chicken was washed with lemon and "exfoliated" with salt to remove all bacteria. What a day at the spa! Haha?
     Then! It was time to dismember and remove the innards. Apparently you don't feed the chicken the morning you are going to kill it because when you cut off the head you will get chunks of undigested food... Who wants that? Anyways, we found some small eggs on the inside! Which we kept to boil in the soup. We cut up the chicken, removed all its goods, took out the intestines to give to the dogs, and just about everything other than the feet, the head, and the intestines were put into the soup. Which will cook for 2 hours until lunch time- yum! Apparently we had a very fat chicken today and it will taste better because of how it was raised- you can also tell by the color of the fat, its a yellowy color instead of a white (which isn't as tasty).

A special note to Dana: Your advice was great. Since I've been here I've only said "Yes!" And I have had some of the best experiences.

What I've learned:
1) Natural, fresh food and natural preparation is the most delicious and rewarding way to eat. It really makes you enjoy your meat when you raised it and prepared it yourself. Also, the only thing we used on it was lemon (from their lemon trees) and salt. No chemicals or chicken bullion flavor or anything that affects the naturalness of what God provided!
2) Don't cook the chicken the same day as you killed it, the muscles are still tense and so is the meat! Too hard to chew. Keep it in your fridge for a day, then cook it.
3) Always say yes!
4) A machete is a good tool to have around the house! Christmas present...?? haha

Beach-bound by 3 AM

3 AM departure 

5 friends and 1 dog

12 hours

Puerto Viejo, Manzanilla Beach, Costa Rica

I will try my best through my stories and pictures to have this blog entry live up to the greatness of this trip! This was honestly, one of the best and most memorable days of my life. Where do I begin?

We packed up earlier Saturday and left Turrialba at 3:00 AM. In the car we had Juan, Tammy, Marco, and their dog, Dixie and then drove about five minutes to pick up Berto. All five of us packed into the car with swimsuits, lunches, and a couple towels and set out on our road trip! It took us about two hours to get there and on the way we played bilingual games, stopped for breakfast and had Argentinian empanadas and batidos de fruta (smoothies), got a flat tire, but luckily the Incredible Hulk (literally, HUGE muscular man) was walking his dog and helped us get the old tire off of our car. Finally, we made it to the beach! The water was warm, but then again, I'm a Minnesotan. For my friends, it was a little cool. 

< Tire. Gone.

> Incredible      Hulk saves the day. This pic doesn't do him justice.

This was OUR tree for the day! No one around. We sat on the log and had a picnic used the tree's swing, climbed the tree, and swam here...ahh I miss it already...

I was hoping to find some monkeys in Puerto Viejo, luckily I found one in our tree!

Story of the towel (for below): Juan was curled up on the shoreline of the beach like he was sleeping so I covered him up with a towel. No more than a half second later a HUGE wave washed up on the shore and drenched the towel. Berto looked at me and said, "That was mine!"...Oops :)

Juan was trying to take this picture with my phone, but couldn't figure out how. We were out there quite a while when suddenly a huge wave splashed us all over and drenched our clothes. After that, the waves were pretty heavy and by the time they were done, we couldn't have been any wetter.

We wanted to make it look like a mystery how we got to this rock...success?

Splash! Not expected! Sooo happy!

The entrance into the cave!!

Dixie provided us much entertainment throughout the day. She is a dog who needs to be cuddled with and near her owners at all times. When we were all swimming, Dixie was whimpering on the shoreline until she braved it out and came into the water. But she hated it so much, she swam to the closest person and climbed up them and on top of their head, wrapping her feet around their face, shoulders, whatever was convenient to get her out of the water. The only bad thing was that she would leave some pretty good scratches on whoever's bare skin she would climb.

This was Dixie's lake. We were walking near it, and randomly although she was so afraid of the water earlier she walked right into in and laid down, to cool off I assume, but for us it was pretty funny.

...I'm never leaving!!! 

The End