Friday 9/12/08

I woke up and Mami fed me a big breakfast of eggs, mystery meat and tortillas before I headed off for Limon. My class was headed to Limon for the weekend. Limon is located right on the Atlantic Ocean. It has a huge Afro-Costarican and Jamaican-Costarican population. Back in the day (1940s and 50s), tons came from Africa and Jamaica to build the train system and simply never left. Therefore, Limon is a predominantly black population and the majority of the people speak Creole English. I had no idea there was such diversity here in Costa Rica. Anyways, we all met up on campus and had a guest speaker from Limon give us a quick lecture about the history of Limon and we loaded the buses for the weekend. On our way east we stopped at a coffee plantation, a pineapple plantation and a banana plantation to learn about the importance of these three exports. Did you know that pineapples grow underground and not on trees? I didn’t until we visited the pineapple plantation. The banana plantation was by far the most interesting. We had a tour of the Del Monte banana plantation and watched the workers package the bananas (probably some that you will eat!). It was somewhat difficult, knowing that they were being paying little to nothing and I was the person on the other end that purchases those bananas at Safeway to top my daily bowl of Wheaties. Although it was somewhat difficult, it was also interesting to watch the process from start to finish. When we arrived in Limon, it was already off to work. That’s right, although we were on the ocean, we still had class-related assignments. We had to head out into the community and interview locals for a paper we will have to right after our trip. After interesting interviews about Limon with some locals, myself and two other group members found a local hole-in-the wall restaurant. We ate Limonese food known as “rice and beans” (yes, in English, because remember the speak English in Limon). It was an interesting rice and beans plate with some spiciness to it. We had the rest of the night free so we enjoyed ourselves by wondering the city, sitting on the docks to watch the thunder and lightning brighten up the ocean waves. We heard about a local reggae concert, so we headed to the free concert. I seriously forgot I was in Costa Rica. We all felt we had been teleported to one of the Carribean Islands. After the concert, we headed to a concert for a beer (ewww gross, I got a Diet Coke instead) to cool ourselves down from the hot humid weather (way worse than San Jose).