Tuesday March 16 in Costa Rica

Away from the hotel at 7:45 AM to visit a butterfly farm outside San Jose, the guide Stefanie was very informative. Wow and more wow, those huge morpho blue butterflies are irridescent blue, and she had one grasped firmly in her hand, and showed us the back and front of it.
Size was maybe 4 inches in all, brown on flip side, but the most wonderful blue on the main side.

We were surprised how fast butterflies move, she said that was to avoid their predators.

Of course we saw the different stages of butterfly development, one stage they are like long fat caterpillars, and are eating machines. That butterfly farm ships all over the world, and there are many families who supply them with butterflies from different parts of Costa Rica. It was an intersting time there.

Then off to the Cafe Britt coffee plantation, where we had an informative and very humourous presentation about growing harvesting and roasting coffee. The beans are harvested from December through March or so I believe, and Costa Rica produces about 2% of the world's coffee. The guide said that their coffee is a high quality, so that their competition is Kona Coffee and that level of beans. We ate lunch there and explored their ample gift shop, picking up coffee for Jen and some for ourselves. The buffet lunch was huge, and just delicious.

Most of the places where we have eaten always give us tropical fruit juice as one of the choices to drink at lunch, a real treat for us northerners.

Then a trip to Sarchi, a crafts village where they build the traditional oxcarts, now mostly miniatures for the tourist trade, as well as beautiful hardwood furniture. We were taken to only one shop, which was so disappointing, we had thought we would be able to visit a whole series of shops in the village. The shop we visited was huge, but the main floor was swelteringly hot, though apparently downstairs where there were bigger pieces of furniture it was lovely and cool. And we only had 1/2 hour, which was also very disappointing for us all. We had been promised that this was our shopping expedition and it would be so great. Not so, and a big bust for lots of people on our trip. Di bought some tee shirts, and a lovely hardwood cutting board, but not much else.

We saw and photographed a beautiful supersized oxcart, with it's bright paint, and oxen yoke, it looked as if it was made for Paul Bunyan and Babe it was so big, and it was inside a protective transparent type of cover.

Back to the hotel for happy hour- I forgot to say that it's a whole hour daily, and the drinks are totally free from 5 -6 PM, then a loud buzzer rings, and no more happy hour. One of the couples in the tour even managed to take a drink or two back up to their room, most of us didn't require that much libation!!!!!

We went back to La Gallera Latin American restaurant across the street from Best Western Irazu for supper, with Dave and Wendy, and 2 other couples, Ron H and his friend Sally, and Joan and Chuck W. It was delicious, and not as noisy as the night before when there had been a young boisterous group there. The theme in the restaurant is roosters, and there are some lovely big swirling watercolors of roosters on the walls, also some clay art tiles, and clay plates, all with the rooster them. Roosters everywhere you looked in the stained glass and decoration around the restaurant.