Colombia, home of some of the world's finest coffee. I wouldn't be able to even fathom writing this blog entry at 8 am (current time) on a Tues. morning without a hearty dose of the stuff, ahhhhhh. Colombians call black coffee with sugar "tinto", which in other countries means red wine, but I'll take either meaning of the word any time. In honor of the hard working coffee growers everywhere, and to make my sister Sam's cheap birthday present seem more special, I will attempt to blog on how it's grown.
I stayed in the coffee growing region in a town called Salento for about a week. It was a lush green hilly place where cows mooed you awake in the morning and where buckets of rain tend to splash down in the afternoon. One morning the sun came out and I took a little walk down to Don Elias' coffee plantation.Don Elias looks exactly like the guy in the pictures you see on coffee packaging. He wears the typical hat, has the mustache, and owns his own little organic coffee farm full of banana trees and pineapple plants. He gave me a tour with his beautiful granddaughter. They apparently don't own a digital camera because she liked to pose for pictures and asked to see them later, giggling with delight. She was so darn cute.
First you grab a basket and pick the beans. Some beans are red when they are ripe, some yellow. Don Elias mixes the different kinds, saying they all taste the same. I've heard some are purple too, and the mix looks like Skittles on trees, but Don Elias didn't have any purple ones. He says the banana trees keep the beans from getting too much sunlight.
The beans are put through this contraption that separates the beans from the skins. At this time the beans are white and still covered with a sweet film.
The beans are dried out in the sun for, uh oh, I forget how many days...a week? The sweet film dries and comes off, er, somehow.When the beans have thoroughly dried, Don Elias toasts them on the stove. This is when they turn black. When ready for a cup of coffee, you grind them...
and Viola! Don Elias doesn't have gas, so he had his grandson start a fire on their wood burning stove for the water.
The granddaughter and her cousin were singing along to Shakira songs while I sipped the best coffee I've ever tasted. I bought a couple bags for Sam's birthday to complement an apparently "surprise" other present from mom that Sam picked out. They were toasted just the day before. I took them to the post office today in Medellin but they were rejected. Hmmm, I might have to try my luck in customs...they might end up being a Christmas present---fingers crossed nothing gets confiscated!
In the meantime, my backpack smells goooooood...!
NESTLE Can Can Pops, ¡explota en la boca! Or as the English translation on the back of the wrapper says, "Explode!" Do we have these in the States? They actually put Pop Rocks into the cream of the cookies. I had 8 hours on a bus from Popayan to San Agustin to master the art of getting them to pop the loudest. You can't just eat the cookie, no no, that won't work. You have to do it Oreo style (you do eat them how you're supposed to, don't you?) by pulling the cookies apart very carefully and scraping the cream frosting off with your top front teeth like a beaver. Here's the trick, you have to let the cream melt in your mouth until you feel the Pop Rocks start to sizzle, wait a little longer and---CRACK! I personally think they should put Pop Rocks into everything.
I wonder if they have people posing behind lights? That's how people in Colombia used to dress before the Spanish robbed them of their treasure. I'm sure they must have worn something under the gold, I hope.
See it? See it? I took this picture while snorkelling, a friend from the cruise lent me his underwater camera---it's a hammerhead shark! If that picture doesn't stimulate your optical nerves, here are some that I hope might...
Taking in more volcanoes at Isabela island
