Weekend in Limon

Friday - We left LASP headquarters around 9 for Limon. Along the way we stopped at a coffee plantation- I had no idea what coffee looked like on the plant. They are just little berries that have to be picked by hand. Then we stopped at a pineapple farm - I was very impressed with how huge those plants were. The we stopped at a banana plantation - It was a DelMonte one, we got to see all the plants and the processing that the bananas go through. Bananas do not grow on trees, they are just large plants. Then we went to the biggest port in Costa Rica. Costa Rica exports a ton of stuff through this one port in Limon. It was huge and beautiful!!

A little history about Limon - Most of the people there have migrated there from Jamaica, so it is a really cool atmosphere, but also very dangerous. Most of the people speak English, but are now being taught Spanish in the schools. It is the poorest city in Costa Rica and the most dangerous. Poverty is a huge problem there, the streets are filled with poverty. This is all kind of Ironic because Limon has the biggest Port of exports and imports for all of Costa Rica, yet is still horribly poor. It just doesn´t make sense.

Friday night we went around in groups and talked to the people about poverty, it was really interested to hear their own perspective. We heard all kinds of different answers about why poverty is such a big problem and how it compares to the rest of the Latin American Countries. My group talked to this one guy names Franklin. He said he was a street child and never had any parents. He took car of himself and never got caught up in drugs or alcohol, he respected his body. He is 50 years old and doing fine. Although he has had a hard time, he seems to be enjoying himself.

Saturday we went to the beach!! The water was warm, it was beautiful!! The waves were huge and a lot of fun. I could not believe how strong they were. Saturday evening we ate dinner with the Methodist youth group of Limon and had a band come. The band played salsa type music and we all learned how to salsa. The youth were really good about teaching us. It was so much fun!! It was dancing in its perfect environment. I had a blast!! I think a group of us are going to go out Thursday night to go dancing again - yah!!!

Sunday after church we were heading back to San Jose. We left around 130 with a tree hour drive mas o menos. Mas o Menos means more or less and the Ticos say it all the time. It means really they have no idea how long it will take. So we ended up sitting in traffic stopped for several hours. It was right before we got into the mountains. We heard that there was a car accident and someone died so they had to wait for either a judge or somebody important to pronouce him dead at the scene. So we all were out of the vans just hanging out and we thought about taking another route so we turned around and then found out that the other road had a car accident. so we got right back into the line of traffic and just sat there. And then a little while later we heard that there was a landslide, so there was no way that we were getting through on that road. While sitting there we had a GPS thing that said we were 20 miles away from San Jose, but that was distance between the two points, it was much longer by road because it was through the mountains. So then we turned around and took the backroads. It was kind of scary. There was a point that it was so foggy we couldn´t even see the road. I finally got home at 1130. It was 10 hours worth of traveling for a mas o menos 3 hour drive.

We really enjoyed ourselves, it was a really good bonding time. We played a whole bunch of silly games and had some really good conversations. We were all kind of hoping that we would get stuck in Limon and have to spend the night in the vans, it would have made the story a little more interesting.

It was a great weekend and a lot of fun. They said that is was a good introduction into the Costa Rican life, you never know what is going to happen.