Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen how industry, culture, and the environment have shaped Costa Rica’s coffee and tropical agriculture trade. I am excited to know so much about tropical agriculture that is commonplace in my life. For example for every place we have visited, except for palmito, my family buys the product on…

Today we finished our company site visits by going Sibö Chocolate for a chocolate history and tasting tour from when the indigenous people would make a cocoa drink to modern day techniques of making godforsaken white “chocolate”. Sibö Chocolate was started in 2008 by two men, historian Julio Fernandez Amón and journalist George Soriano, who…

It is crazy that a week ago today we had just landed in Costa Rica and were just getting set up in homestays and now I feel totally at home in my homestay. So far we have been to the Central Valley, the cloud forest of Monteverde, and driven by the Pacific coast towns of…

Today we visited Life Monteverde a coffee plantation with other locally sourced crops and animals on this tour we got a window into what the Tico farmers’ lives are like: constantly conserving and collaborating with their neighbors. The 40 hectares that Life Monteverde is on is co-owned by twenty people so collaboration is pertinent. Life…

Today we visited the cloud forest reserve (established with the help of the Alabamian Quakers). After visiting the preserve and talking with Don Guillermo of Life Monteverde today, it was easy to notice the competing interests of productivity, conservation, and sustainability – especially when faced with climate change when the area that first was supposed…

Today we left the Central Valley (Heredia and San Jose region) to see the cloud forest of Monteverde. What stood out to me about the communities we drove through, the scenery, the street shops, and the people are that times are changing in Costa Rica. Times changing have good and bad effects for example medical…

Today we took a tour of Café Britt to see the roasting and packaging side of the coffee industry rather than the planting and picking and sorting that we saw at the Doka Estate. Britt is a premium coffee brand that sells internationally via e-commerce or in famous restaurants like Legal Seafoods. Like all premium…

Today we had the privilege of touring the beautiful Doka coffee plantation which was a 45-minute drive away from our homestay in Heredia. On the way, we saw beautiful scenery and towns. Today we learned about the coffee growing and producing process on the tour and it consists of several semi-simple steps 1: 10 cahuelas…

What are your first impressions of Costa Rica? My first impressions of Costa Rica are that the people are kind and the food is incredible. I have never been in a place in which you can be standing in a town square and the locals will ask you to take a picture with them or…