Coffee Plantation field trip

Andy was working hard at the coffee plantation. This is the initial grinder to remove the skin on the coffee bean.








There were so many beautiful flowers everywhere. We are in front of a Birds of Paradise plant.



















Lunch with our Danish hotel friends and Mauricio our tour guide.

Hi everyone,

We had a fun day today. We went with our fellow hotel guests from Denmark to the coffee plantation. There are 5 couples from Denmark here in our hotel, and one couple from Spain, and we are the lone US couple. Everyone is so friendly, and we are learning a lot about Denmark. One of the couples has their presentation of their child tomorrow. Jodie and I learned that our presentation of Dana will be Thursday the 22nd at 9:30 a.m. All of our paperwork was dropped off at CRAN Orphanage on Monday and reviewed and accepted. So we are anxiously awaiting Thursday morning.

We spent the day with everyone traveling to the coffee plantation which was about a 2 hour drive over the mountains. We had a great lunch at a little restaurant. Some people had the rabbit, and Jodie and I stuck with the chicken. I did try a piece of the rabbit and it was pretty good. Everything was smothered with sauteed onions and "queso" cheese. That would make anything taste good in my book. One of our Danish friends asked me if I have ever had horse meat? I couldn't say that I have (maybe in a hotdog), and that is sometimes served in Denmark.

The coffee plantation was an older and smaller one for the area. Like many farms in the US bigger is often better, and this one has some old fashioned techniques that have been used for many years. Anyhow it is still in operation and serves the local growers well. The landscape had not only the coffee plants, but tons of flowers including Orchids, which is the national flower of Colombia, Birds of Paradise, and so many others in every color. The weather is so good for plants. There were many lemon trees around as well. It was overwhelming how beautiful it was. After the tour we had a good cup of coffee and a shot of coffee liqueur. As many of you know, we are not coffee drinkers but we gave it a try anyway. Jodie really enjoyed the coffee liqueur though:)

After our tour, we headed back down the mountain to Bogota. The traffic in Bogota is absolutely "loco." Our family in Central Wisconsin would not think it was good in any way. The air quality is quite poor in the city due to the massive number of vehicles. There is so much to look at as you ride through the city though; it is busy!!!

Tomorrow we will prepare for our sweet Dana. Jodie will unpack her clothes and make sure we are ready for her. We are hoping that Cecilia will stop by to give us all the information about what to bring with us on Thursday for the presentation. We are so anxious to meet our Colombian princess. You will all want to check out our blog later in the day on Thursday.

Special Section for my RCI Students:

Hi guys, Are you behaving for Ms. Parisi? I sure hope so. If I hear otherwise, I will call your parents from Colombia:) I hope you are learning everything you need to know about minerals. As I promised, I will try to teach you a little bit about Colombia while I'm here. We are in the capital of Colombia which is Bogota. The city is located in a valley of the Andes Mountains. The population of Bogota is approximately 7 1/2 million people. Yikes! It's just a little bit bigger than the village of Oregon:) There is so much traffic here that you can only drive your car on certain days if your license plate number ends with an odd number and other days if it ends with an even number. They do this to try to reduce the number of cars on the roads each day. Pretty interesting, huh? The money they use here is called Colombian pesos. 1 US dollar equals approximately 1800 pesos. So today we went to the grocery store and bought a few items and our total came to 68,000 pesos. Now that is a pretty scary grand total when you are dealing with such big numbers, but in US dollars it was only 30 some dollars. We went to lunch today and our bill was $100,000 pesos. It definitely takes awhile to get used to. Anyway, I must go for now.

Purple puppies! (This is a secret code for one of my classes. You know who you are and what I mean.)