C is for Coffee

Hello poetry lovers,

Well the first week of training has come and gone, and I am pretty exhausted. Adapting to life with a host family is pretty tiring on its own, and we've also be having a lot of classes. The daily schedule here is interesting so I'll delve into it for a while. It is essentially based around the sun, which rises around 5 (maybe a little before?) and sets around 6. the cloud cover however can make things dark far before their time, so that on Saturday, by 4:30 it was already evening, tending towards darkness. My host family basically operates around the sun schedule, waking up by 5:30, and going to bed around 9 (that is a household average), the teenage son and I can skew it quite heavily. My host mom is very nice, forces me to eat far too much, and is full of suggestions on how to fit in better. I think she enjoys having someone around to talk to in the afternoons, and its fun to practice my Spanish while drinking amazing coffee. The town I am staying in is right in the middle of coffee country, and today I went on a walk with some other trainees and one of their mom's down through a coffee farm to a 'mirador' and then to a 'beneficio' where they transform coffee from a berry to a powder. Almost everywhere you turn here there are extensive coffee fields, and the views from nearly every point are incredible. Bits of cloud and fog float about the area all day, and as many are below our elevation as above. The hills around are rather drastic, with sharp ridges and towns nestled around crevices almost everywhere. The coffee fields are regularly located at improbable angles along slopes that would give pause to big horn sheep. We are in the heart of winter in Costa Rica, meaning that big rain storms are predicted every day, but they have so far manifested themselves in rather paltry mists and bursts of heavy rain. I'll take this time to apologize for the complete chaos of this post, I have not yet had a lot of time to plan out or write in any order. The town I am in is of about 3,000 people, and it is becoming a center of commerce at a crossroads on the way to what were once larger towns. There are nine other trainees here, and we train in the same place but in two different groups. On other days we take the bus up to a different town and all the trainees (45) have classes at the same training center. There is a completely different microclimate up there, such that it is almost always raining when we take the bus back, and sometimes the visibility is down below one hundred feet. So far everyone here is really nice, and I am having a wonderful time.

Sincerely,
-Barton