Mayonaise, Bat Manicures and How Not to Get Rich

As this is the last day before school vacation, this is the last chance to write a blog entry that may be read to the class in school. I, Sandra, am writing for Ella this evening because she got sick this afternoon. It doesn't appear to be Dengue Fever, or a stomach problem and there no strangle marks from fig trees, so we think it will pass quickly. I suspect my blog entry will be the full on educational blog entry you've all been waiting for...(yeah?) Ella hasn't yet written about our visit to a coffee and chocolate "finca" which is a word that means "ranch" or "plantation". We got to see the entire process of producing coffee - from red fruit on the tree to the hot drink. (Chocolate, too. And yes, we got to sample all stages...) Coffee beans are actually the seeds of bright red coffee fruits. The leaves are a deep green. Kids here call them trees of Christmas or something like that, because the fruits ripen around Christmas, and the trees are red and green with fruit and leaves. Also, kids used to earn pocket money for Christmas gifts by picking fruits. (or "granas de cafe" en Spanish.) Here is a picture of Ella picking granas de cafe.

Here is a math problem: Each trabajador (worker) who picks granas gets about two dollars for filling a box (caja) with coffee fruits. Each box hold about 2 kilograms of fruits. It takes 30-60 minutes hour for a good picker to fill a box. Each box of fruits eventually produces about 200 cups of coffee. In the USA, a cup of coffee costs between $2 and $4. So....how much does a coffee picker earn in an 8 hour day? What is the actual value of a box of coffee fruits? What percentage does a picker get? How can we account for the cost of processing the fruits, drying the seeds, and shipping them around the world? Do you think a coffee picker should be able to buy a cup of Starbucks coffee? In the USA, many fruit pickers are from Mexico, because people from the US don't want to work so hard for so little pay. In Costa Rica, most coffee pickers are Nicaraguan, because Costa Ricans don't want to work so hard for so little pay. Mexico is a poorer country than the US, and Nicaragua is poorer than Costa Rica -- poorer in fact than every other country in the western hemisphere except Haiti, the poorest of all. On the subject of chocolate, all I can say is that it is excellent here! And it is a fermented product, which means that it goes through a nice, stinky stage where it is covered in a whitish goo that smells like beer.

Back to Christmas trees. Our host family (who is totally fabulous) has a Christmas tree that is just an evergreen branch stuck in a one gallon plastic jar that says "Hellman's Mayonaise" on it. Underneath is a nativity (birth of Jesus) scene entwined with Christmas lights. And I must say, it seems perfect. I don't know why I never thought of the mayo jar myself. It makes our traditional US Christmas seem like a bit too much. Our family has two girls, Alanis and Lisbeth, and Ella plays with them a lot. They kind of speak English because they go to a bilingual

school. I am always reminding the older girl to speak Spanish with Ella. We all played cards the other night. Paul tried to say "play a queen" and he ending up saying "juice, sand" (jugo arena instead of juegue una reina)

Monteverde would be a pretty good place to live if you had a way to make money. It has lots of protected forests and many scientists. It is a very international community. You can get traditional rice and beans and fried bananas, or you can choose to buy a truffle from the Argentine chocolate shop. (a good one is the coconut volcano). The whole set up is sort this ramshackle array of buildings spread out along a rocky, muddy road that serves as passage for cars, motorbikes, dumptrucks and lots of pedestrians. There are several very artsy, non-ramshackle and expensive hotels There are also a bunch of Quakers here who came to Costa Rica because it is a peaceful country with no army and in general Quakers like to avoid war. I'll bet you do, too. In the picture below, there is a mountain behind Ella. That is actually the continental divide. If you stood there on a day that was perfectly clear, you could see BOTH the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. We went there, but saw only clouds...

Oh, and tomorrow night we are going to go give bat manicures. We met a researcher who catches bats in mist nets, paints their nails so he can identify them later, then releases them. He invited us to come along one night! The guy's name is Fabio and he is this Costa Rica (Tico) dude with dreadlocks, sloppy clothes and absolutely perfect, unimpeachable manners. The manners come from being Tico, and perhaps the dreads from being from the Carribean coast. Happy school vacation and take good care of the Keewoos. I'll tell you more about them when I return. Sandra

What Spanish Class is Like

The first few things that pop into my head (cabeza) when I think about Spanish class are annoying, baffling, useful and that there is no end. Also, I think about exploding cabezas. My classes are a bit annoying because when you want to tell your teacher something exciting and your teacher does not speak English, you have to say it in Spanish, right? So when you are just learning Spanish and don't know very much, you can't tell it to your teacher without looking it up in a huge Spanish-English dictionary (AAAAAAAA). Spanish class is baffling because you are just learning Spanish, your teacher doesn't know English and she is trying to teach you something that you don't understand (at least not very well). Class is useful because YOU ARE LEARNING ANOTHER LANGUAGE! It allows you to move to Costa Rica, become a rainforest biologist and be able to actually talk to people. There actually IS an end although it feels like there isn't. I think about exploding cabezas because mine exploded last night. Class is very complicated. Bingo, Memory, Go Fish, even Jenga -- My teacher and I have played all of them together. (the Jenga tower fell on me) In some ways the adapted Spanish versions are harder. If you have played Bingo in Spanish or Memory using one picture and one word (in Spanish of course) as a pair instead of two pictures then you know what I mean. Of all the games that wwe play, Jenga is the hardest. Each block has one Spanish verb on it and when you pull it out of the tower you have to say a sentence with that verb. And I am still learning verbs! Despite all the games we play, I still don't recommend this school for having fun. I recommend it for learning.

A Rainbow... on a Bird

Yesterday we saw three resplendent quetzal while they were digesting avocados. They are these very brightly colored birds that are very rare. The males have long feathers that look like tails but are actually long feathers that come from the back.

One of the more interesting things about them is they eat mostly avocados! Also their backs look green to your eye but they are actually brown. There are prisms is their wing feathers instead of pigment, and the prisms reflect the light so they are iridescent. They look green or blue depending on the light. We took this picture through a spotting scope that our guide had.

The Aztec and Maya use the think that the quetzal were gods. I can see why they thought that because their bright colors and long tail feathers make them god-like. Their tail feathers are as long as their body. When they fly they flap behind them. I didn't know that avocados were the food of the gods.

After a quetzal eats avocado it flies away from the tree and sits down to digest the avocado. When the avocado has been digested they spit up the seeds. I think avocado are spread by the quetzals when they carry the seeds away and spit them up somewhere else. Our guide finds quetzal by listening for the sound of dropping avocado seeds in the forest.

In Which I Learn the Glory of Ficus

Yesterday I climbed up a huge strangler fig (ficus). A ficus is a vine that climbs down from a tree from the top of a tree and strangles it. The tree beneath dies and rots away leaving a hollow tube of vines that are awesome to climb. I climbed up the hollow tube and looked out the holes. I climbed up such a high strangler fig that when I looked out the hole I was looking down on the canopy of the forest. I picked a leaf from way up there that I am pressing in a book.

I also learned about the most venomous spider in the world, the Brazilian Wandering Spider. When it gets ready to fight it puts its front forelegs together like its doing karate. My dad's friend Geoff made a video of one attacking his flip flop. It's on Youtube and I put the link in this blog. You can hear Geoff's girlfriend in the background saying "no, no, mi amor!" Notice the ant calmly walking by.



We went on a walk in the rainforest that was mostly skybridges which are long swaying bridges that go through the canopy. It was an amazing sight to look down. We tried so hard to see sloths but we didn't see any. I bet we passed five of them without knowing it! We did see lots of hummingbirds.

Moths and Sloths

Curiconcha Wildlife Reserve, Santa Elena, Costa Rica

We just got back from a night walk. We saw a tarantula in a water pipe. It was as big as my hand and it had orange “knees”. Some mammals we saw were a grey fox, a kinkajou and a skunk. We also saw several clusters of birds called brown jays sleeping. We saw them from beneath so we saw their bellies. They were as big as ducks. From underneath they looked like ducks, too. We also saw bats flitting about in the moonlight around some hummingbird feeders.

We almost saw a sloth. I learned that sloths have sloth “beetles” (though they aren't technically beetles) living on them, but the beetles aren't parasites and they aren't bad. The sloth beetles turn into sloth moths which live around the sloths. Sloths can swim. I wonder what the sloth beetles do when the sloths go under water. I can imagine a swarm of sloth moths flying over the water so you can tell where the sloth is. I wonder if moths and sloths talk to each other.

There are two kinds of sloths in Costa Rica, the two-toed and the three-toed. Three-toed sloths are one of the only wild mammals in the world that you can pick up and hold and they won't bite you. They are very gentle. They live in the lower elevations. The two-toed sloth would bite you more easily. They live in the higher elezvations like Monteverde where we are.

I learned that ant eaters are vicious.

My dad's friend Geoff says that he has picked up tarantulas with his bare hands and that they only bite when they really have to. There are other spiders that would bite you more easily like the brown recluse and black widow. Both occur in Washington.

Today for lunch I cooked 30 tortillas for 10 people. We were doing a cooking class that is part of the Spanish program we are doing.

Exploding Head

Monteverde, Costa Rica (cerca de Santa Elena)

We are in Monteverde and have met our host family. There are two girls. One is 6 and the other is almost 10. Alanis and Lisbeth.

Today we had our first day of Spanish class. It was for the whole morning. I felt like my head was going to explode. I learned how to tell people about myself.

I have started a leaf collection. One of my favorite things about Costa Rica are the plants. There are some leaves that could fit 7 of my heads. Tomorrow is our second day of Spanish class. (9 more to go!)

Monteverde is the perfect temperature, not too hot, not too cold. The view is amazing, mostly forest. We haven't been in the forest yet, but I have seen some of the plants. Some of the trees look hairy with bromeliads. We are at 5,000 feet above sea level (higher than White Pass), but we can see the Gulf of Nicoya (in Pacific Ocean).

How I Learned the Pain of Nuts and Dollars

Hotel Aranjuez, San Jose, Costa Rica

Yesterday it was too hot. There was some shade under trees but one of the trees had a squirrel in it and whenever you walked beneath the tree, the squirrel would drop half-eaten nuts on your head. You had to stay under the big umbrella leaves, but even then you could hear the nuts thumping on them. The hotel we are staying at has no roof and no doors in some places (courtyards). There are plants growing inside. They aren't in pots!

The funny thing is you can't put toilet paper in the toilets. You have to put it in the garbage. I kept putting my toilet paper in the toilet by mistake and in the middle of the night the toilet started making these weird retching and gurgling noises.

My dad thought he was asking the hotel clerk in Spanish "can we use dollars?" but it turns out he was asking him if he could use "pains". The word for dollars is dolares (with an accent over the o) and the word for pains is dolores! The Costa Rican money is called colones.

Today we are going on a four hour bus ride to meet our host family in Monteverde. Tomorrow we start Spanish school. That might help my dad.