Heredia day 2 - coffee and updates!

Last night, I went out to dinner with Charlie. Once again, it´s so great to have a local to take you places you wouldn´t otherwise get to. Even better when their English is awesome and they can translate the menu for you! Not only that but Charlie is hilarious! Wish we could bottle him up and bring him back to the States!

For dinner, we had a type of fried plantain pancakes for an appetizer as well as guacamole. For dinner, I had something that I don´t remember what it´s called but it reminded me of fajitas - chicken, peppers, onions, all that good stuff. ( Will Luera- i took photos of the food just for you!)

After dinner, we met up with another one of Mcgorty´s friends - Leo - and we went to a bar called El Bulevar and drank local beer (Imperial). I was shocked (and excited) to see Monday night football on!? Nice! (Of course, Hines Ward makes an amazing play the week i bench him from my fantasy team. ) Anyway - Tonight, i´m sure we will do more of the same!

The people in Costa Rica are so nice. All of them! Being here in Heredia is not too diferent from a small U.S. city... you see a lot of familiarity around you. But whenever I feel that way, i realize all I have to do is look up to the sky - and then i see I am surrounded by these amazing ominous mountains! I feel like they are calling to me... and I know I will be seeing them soon (tomorrow) as I start to travel north to the Arenal Volcano! I´m not going to lie - I´m looking forward to a little nature and some real deal hot springs!

Today, I went to Cafe Britt (http://www.cafebritt.com/) and did a tour. Cafe Britt is one of the most popular coffee manufacturers in the country. The tour was pretty silly at times (actors showed you different parts of the coffee process) but I have to say they were pretty funny. And, I got a lot of samples of coffee and chocolate covered goodness. Win win I´d say. Tucker and I saw coffee plantations when we were in Dallat Vietnam last year. The process is of course quite simliar. One difference, though, is how they use the leftovers. When you get a bean for roasting, you only use 20% of the original bean. In Costa Rica, they are required by law to recycle the rest of the bean and shell. So, they make it into fertilizer. (In Vietnam, they use the shell as fuel - they burn it to make fires or create steam to run their factories!)

Traveling alone has been really fine thus far. Sure, on occasion I´m looking around for Tucker or Wendy - but for the most part, being alone has been great. I think the fact that I live alone and have lately spent a lot of time on my own definitely helped to prepare me for this. I haven´t felt lonely at all and not having a cell phone has been really nice!

Sorry for the lack of photos. This computer is too old. Next stop, I´ll hopefully get to upload...
p.s. My espanol knowledge has more than doubled! I still reply in the wrong language sometimes (and today I accidentally said Oui instead of Si!) but i´m definitely improving!