El Carmen de Viboral - By Maria

 

The first town we stayed in was called El Carmen de Viboral. This town is a big town; about 65,000 people live here. It is known for all of its ceramics. Greenhouses and plant nurseries are everywhere. 

The ceramics are painted with colorful pigments by hand and they are really pretty. They are also all around the city on houses and buildings for decoration. 

Building decorated with ceramic plates

Tiles were also a common decoration. 

Why aren't pharmacies so pretty in the U.S.? 

Even the planters are decorated! 

This is the bottom of a lamppost decorated with tiles and ceramic plates. 

We had the opportunity to paint some ceramics and it was really hard, but it was really cool. It took a long time. 

This is the ceramic plate I painted. 

This shows examples of some of the more traditional designs. 

A cute little hand painted tea set

We're staying a little bit out of town and there are greenhouses all around us. The farm we're staying on has a greenhouse of tomatoes. There is a large flower factory up the street. Many of the cut flowers you buy in the United States may come from this region. 

Our house with a tomato greenhouse behind it. 

This is the inside of the greenhouse that grows tomatoes. It is a lot bigger than it looks. You can't see the whole thing. 

We are surrounded by mountains in this town. They are beautiful and they have dense jungle on them. We went on a hike to the top of a mountain. It was really pretty. We saw a lot of cool bugs, and some not cool bugs too - like the swarm of bees I accidently walked through and got stung nine times. There were also some cool flowers. 

This is one of the huge bugs we saw on the hike.

These were cool butterflies that were everywhere on the trail. 

Me at the top of the mountain

 

View of our house from the mountain. 

View of the mountain from our house! (It's the one in the middle.)

These horses were running around the streets alone. They probably lived close because we saw them alone in the streets frequently. 

 

El Carmen de Viboral was a very pleasant town with lots of nice people.