(Blog by Lauren Wallace and Sabrina Leuer)

Hola from San Jose!



We woke up to a beautiful view of palm trees and headed over to breakfast at the hotel. They have many fruity options including fresh fruit, homemade jellies, and fruit juice. Beans and rice were a traditional Costa Rican option!



Next, we hopped on our bus and headed to downtown San Jose for a city tour. The city itself is extremely congested. There are approximately five million people in Costa Rica and half of them live in San Jose! The traffic is pretty bad because all of the buses have to go through downtown San Jose no matter where they are headed.



Our first stop was at the cathedral, Solemne Homenaje. They were having service when we stopped by so we didn't spend too much time inside.





We stopped by the Central Market and took a look around. It had anything you could imagine including fruits and vegetables, meats, pet gerbils, and Costa Rican souvenirs.




Next up we stopped at a beautiful theater that was built as a replica of an old French theater. The architecture and landscaping outside was stunning!



A very exciting addition to our day was the amazing coffee tour at Cafe Britt! Our two tour guides were quite the characters and definitely made us laugh and kept us interested the whole time.



We learned about many aspects of coffee including the growing cycle. They start as a seed which gets planted into soil in a nursery. Banana leaves are placed on top to ensure there is adequate humidity for germination. About two months later, the seed produces a sprout. After approximately a year, the coffee plant is moved out of the nursery (coffee plant shown on far right in image above) and is planted in their fields.




Once the coffee plant starts producing the cherries, they are all harvested one by one. This is done by hand because the coffee cherries ripen at different times. Kaitlin Sikkink was chosen to help demonstrate this process!



There was so much more to the coffee tour and overall it was a great experience! We had lunch at their cafe afterwards and purchased some coffee and various chocolate from their store.




Next up, we went to the hometown of our fellow Costa Rican teammate, Melissa Rodriguez! Sarchi is a bit more rural than San Jose and gave us an even deeper look into the culture. We went to a couple souvenir shops and saw the famous ox cart, as shown above!




Then, we enjoyed a delicious dinner with a beautiful view, courtesy of Meli's parents.



We also took a quick stop at Meli's house and got to see her tropical backyard filled with many different fruit trees!



After an hour bus ride to Universidad National, we warmed up and competed in our second match of the trip. Once again, it was great to play against a Costa Rican team with much love and passion for volleyball.



We were also lucky enough to have some of the parents come all the way from the US to watch us play!



To finish off the evening, we came back to the hotel and enjoyed some pizza and tea. Thank you for following along and check back tomorrow for another adventurous day!
 
Ciao,
Minnesota Crookston Volleyball