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Coffee - By Maria

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Did you know that Colombia is one of the places that produces the most coffee in the world? Here are some interesting facts about how they do it. We are staying on a coffee farm, and the coffee harvesting season is just being wrapped up. The typical harvest last two months. During the harvest, the farmers hire coffee pickers to pick the coffee berries off plants. When the coffee fruit is ripe and ready to be picked, it is dark red. The fruit around the coffee bean tastes sweet and juicy. When you eat it, you eat the flesh off the bean, not bean itself. The coffee field that we can see from our porch Me picking ripe coffee fruit to taste A bag of coffee berries collected that day A worker getting what he collected weighed Coffee pickers are paid based on the weight of coffee they pick. When they are done collecting for the day, they hang their bags on a scale to see how much money they will get. They get paid 1,200 pesos per kilogram they pick. Today, this is about $0.28 for every 2.2 l...
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Where the Jungle Meets the Sea - By Maria

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Hello from Selva Mojada, which translates to Wet Jungle. It is one of the rainiest places in the world. We were in Choco, which is a Colombian state on the Pacific Ocean. We stayed where the jungle goes all the way up to the ocean. Beach at the first location we stayed The first place we visited was on the beach. We walked on the beach for a while to go to a town called Pangui. We walked 5k there and back. We had to swim across a river to get to the town. It was a very small town and most things were closed because it was New Year’s Day. We had to race the tides back to the place we were staying because as the tides raise, the beach disappears.  Some people used this raft to cross the river Dugout canoes outside of Pangui We found some huge shells on the beach. A sand dollar that washed upon the shore A beetle almost as big as my hand! All these red crabs come out when it is sunny A unique thing about travel in this region is that it is by boat and there are no roads connecting the...
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Foods and Drinks of Colombia - By Seth (with some help from Maria)

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  There are so many amazing foods and drinks in Colombia and some of them are natural fruit juices and panela, and some of the natural fruit juice flavors are mango, blackberry, strawberry, passion fruit, guanabana (soursop), guava, lemonade, coconut lemonade, lulo, orange and mandarin. You can pick if you want your juice to be in water or milk. My favorite type is strawberry and blackberry in water. Panela is sugar water. There are 2 types of panela. One type is cold and with lemonade, the other type is warm with just sugar. Sometimes they put cheese in it. I don’t like it with cheese at all. Coffee is pretty much what Colombia is known for. One of my favorite foods in Colombia is salchipapas. Salchipapas are french-fries and sausage that sometimes has rosada sauce. Rosada sauce is ketchup mixed with mayonnaise. I don’t like rosada sauce. In Colombia lots of sauces come in pouches like mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard and jelly. Some types of jelly are blackberry, strawberry, pineappl...
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