I mentioned in my last post that my cousins came to visit me in December. On their last day in Costa Rica, my cousins and I went on a coffee tour at Cafe Britt, a gourmet coffee roaster. Even though Costa Rica is known for producing some of the best coffee in the world, prior to Cafe Britt's founding in 1985, it was very hard to find any of that good coffee within the country, because most of it was being exported. Cafe Britt was created to educate visitors on the origins and sustainable production of gourmet Costa Rican coffee.
Coffee berries. The red ones are ready to be harvested.
Some of our tour guides. These guys were hilarious!
Inside the packaging facility
Beautiful flowers were blooming everywhere we walked during our tour.
Part of the tour was a dramatic interpretation of the history of coffee...pretty random, but funny. My cousin K (on the right) got recruited to be the bride's maid of honor during the skit I'm not exactly sure how the wedding was connected to the history of coffee, but oh well!
After the skit, K got some free coffee and a traditional coffee-harvesting hat for being a good sport!
After the tour, we went over to a neighborhood called Barrio Maynard. I may not have mentioned it before, but my maternal grandmother's family used to live in Costa Rica, which was one reason I was so interested in living here when I was looking into different countries I could teach in. Barrio Maynard in the neighborhood where my grandmother and her family lived for many years. Here's the sign for the street they lived on. Isn't it pretty?
Pretty houses
The cab driver didn't know where we needed to go (the neighborhood is pretty small...really just one street long), so we got completely lost for a while. A long while. Luckily, my cousin V had visited the street with her family about four years earlier, so she was able to help us find the way.
Once we were in the neighborhood, it took us a while to find the actual house they lived in, but we finally did! We weren't really sure what it looked like, and the house numbers and colors and everything else have changed a lot since then, but we figured this might be it since it was one of the older-looking houses on the street. I e-mailed this picture to my great-uncle (my grandmother's youngest brother), who confirmed that this was their house. Apparently, Benito Mussolini's grandson also lived there at one time.
I had been wanting to find her house ever since I moved here, and I'm so glad I got to see it with my cousins! My mom and sister will be visiting sometime in the spring, so I definitely want to take them to see it. My great-uncle suggested that we knock on the door and ask to look around to see what it's like now, but maybe that's too weird. What do you think?
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