September 25-28 Birthday, Market, Cartago, & Orosi

WE celebrated Molly's birthday (15!) with a pizza and card playing sleepover party with the Elon students the night before her birthday,





and dinner out on her birthday. Friends at school snuck in a birthday cake at lunch time and sang to her, and friends from home created a "virtual" party via Skype! Molly reported that the whole day turned out to be a wonderful celebration, from start to finish!


Then Sunday, we began this Elon travel day with a trip to market. Our family tends to go every weekend to stock up on fruits, vegetables, and organic bread (see our rain date there in the blog entry 'El dia de la Independencia"). In addition to the mangos, coconut (fresh and dry), papaya, watermelon, pineapple, and a fruit similar to lee chee but it looks like stiff anemones, here are some of the vegetables that we buy now:

This is pejibaye. I cook it for forever,

then peel it,

and make a cream soup with it.

In this photo from the avocado in a clockwise circle are: Avocado, which we call aquacate here, juca (cassava root) which also has to be precooked and then fried with garlic and sprinkled with lots of lime, chayote which is like an apple potato and is a very versatile vegetable that can be steamed with green beans or put in stews among other things, chile dulce which is similar to red peppers at home but sweeter and they go with just about everything, and then the two kinds of avocados. At the top of the photo is a green from the chayote plant that you can use like watercress or a green that you would toss into a stew. Very cheap, very tasty!

Finally, we have something called a tree tomato! (We also saw a wild tomato in Monteverde, but that one was really good for cleaning out your system so we only tasted that one. The point here that is so interesting, is how many tomato varieties exist in the world with many different tastes and health-related properties.)

From the market we went to Orosi, which is a nearby town and very beautiful valley,

with the oldest church, Iglesia de San Jose Orosi, still in use in Costa Rica (from 1743, after they kind of wiped out the native population, the church was not needed quite so much for a while, till they built back a population to convert).

The students, and of course Ruthie and Molly, were more interested in the soccer game going on (every town, no matter its size seems to have a soccer field, and it is often in a central location).

Some folks eventually headed down to the river, and that is where we discovered a little shanty town with houses made of recycled materials built in a helter skelter style. Not sure about the plumbing situation, but one of them had a large antenna. This lead to explorations of poverty in Costa Rica, and we learned from some newly-made Gringo friends who do a lot of volunteer work here that there are massive shanty towns and tremendous poverty but it is more encapsulated and the situation is far, far better than in Nicaragua where we will be going next.

From Orosi we headed toward the church in Cartago, the city that was the first capital in Costa Rica. This church, Basilica de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles, was built several times actually, and is the church of the patron saint of Costa Rica. The story is that a young girl found a statue of the Virgin Mary on a rock and brought it home with her, but the next day it disappeared from her home and reappeared again on the rock, twice. When the priest heard about it, he tried to lock it up, but it disappeared from the vault, and, yup, reappeared on the rock. The people thought maybe she would just like to stay there, and so they built the church around the rock, and you can see that stone and the statue (called La Negrita) that was found so many years ago. There is also a spring of running holy water, and glass cases with all the charms that people left with their prayers for health or safety in particular ways. Below is a glass case with breasts, lungs, stomachs, and what not. Next to it is a case with legs.

On August 2 every year, hundreds of thousands Ticos fill Cartago, having walked there from all corners of the country, to pray at this church. The centrality of church was very clear in multiple ways, including those ways mentioned above, and also the presentation of babies to the church, and other people kneeling as they entered the church and processing down the very long aisle on their knees. Or, as in this photo, both.