As if the bananas weren't enough... we also got to go to a Cacao Farm. For those of you who aren't sure what that is... it's a chocolate farm! This was pretty much the dream of a lot of girls in the group, but because I don't like chocolate that much it wasn't so amazing. It was really interesting, though, because I've never through of where chocolate comes from before its a solid brown bar. I was really surprised to see the trees it grows on and the fruit it grows inside. This was a really cool experience. In the picture, you can see the inside of something that looks like a mix between a pumpkin and a cantaloupe... that's a cacao. When you crack it open, those slimy white things actually contain the chocolate seed. I actually ate some of that gooey stuff (aren't you proud of me!?) and it was really sweet and pretty tasty. There is a whole long fermentation process where those beans basically sit in giant boxes for a couple of days until they dry out. After that they are cooked... then a couple more steps are taken until the chocolate we know turns up.
A group of Costa Rican women have started their own chocolate company that uses no preservatives and is completely eco-friendly. Apparently we have a lot of connections through ACM, because we got to go to the house of these cute, old ladies and have an AMAZING lunch cooked for us. They talked us through how they started their company, why they started it, and the empowerment it shows for women in Costa Rica. The chocolate they gave us was actually 75% chocolate and 25% sugar... something we cannot even grasp the concept of in the U.S. Now, I'm not a big chocolate person, but this was definitely the best chocolate I've ever tasted. Without any preservatives or whatever other fake stuff they put in our chocolate, it was actually less than 100 calories per bar.
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