Earth to San Jose

On our way back from the beach, we took a little detour to the campus of EARTH University. EARTH stands for Escuela de Agricultura de la Region Tropical Humeda and is a private, non for profit university that educates and does research on sustainable agriculture in the tropics. We have had several graduates from the school at the Ranch and I thought it might be interesting to check out the campus. It is 3300 hectare property that was started partly by US aid and the Kellogg foundation, and contributions from the Costa Rica government. Their student population is primarily made up of people from Central and South America, Carribean islands, and Africa and much of their tuition is paid for through grants and other funding sources within the university. If you've ever bought bananas at Whole Foods, you may have heard of EARTH because they are one of their suppliers of organically grown bananas. Bananas are a fragile fruit and transporting them can be very tricky. At EARTH, there is a monorail of sorts that transports the not yet ripened fruit from point A to point B. In the photo, the banana train is crossing a main road. Although there is plenty to see at EARTH, we could only stay the afternoon because there were no dorms available.

The next day we headed to San Jose for a little city walking. My main interest was to see the Mercado Central where there is purported to be stalls filled with dry herbs for sale. Also because there is tasty cheap seafood there. What we found was a very organized indoor market with all sorts of souvenirs, leather goods, housewares, butcher shops, vegetable stands, fish stalls, natural health and supplement counters, and of course the herb guys. I was excited at how much of the dried herbs I recognized. I thought about purchasing herbs to prepare decoctions with at the Ranch but they don't really want outside material coming in if they don't know how it was grown.

Breakfast consisted of cafe con leche (milk coffee), shrimp rice, beetroot salad, french fries, and the world cup match between Switzerland and Spain. Yum!




Afterwards, we just strolled along the main drag and observed the josefinos (San Jose inhabitants) going about their day. Of course, these days, the whole country is Copa Mundial crazy! People stop to watch the game where ever they can, even in front of the electronics store.