Yesterday we hiked into town to meet the local produce girl to pick up our order. The ordering is done through email in Spanish. Last week our hosts were pretty hands-on helping us manage, this week we did it by ourselves.
We showed up at the produce drop point (between the beach and Tico Mex in town), and the produce girl pulled out a hand written note with our order itemized. It looked like a really long list.
As she started going through the order and we began packing it into a backpack and an over-sized plastic crate, it became clear there was no way the girls and I were going to be able to Sherpa all of this stuff the half-kilometer back home. Always the optimists though, we kept trying to figure out how to squeeze in the next item we were handed. Two big pineapples, a giant papaya, a bag of oranges, a cabbage, a red cabbage (?), mushrooms (?!), two kinds of squash (?!), a PUMPKIN (??!!), holy cow!!!
The pumpkin and the mushrooms were the final tip-off that they had misunderstood our order. We sent them a table with everything they had available to chose from with the number of each we wanted in the last column. Where the number column was blank, they assumed that meant "1" (even though there was actually a one after a lot of items), so they basically gave us one of everything in their local farm network, unless we had a larger number in the row in which case they gave us that amount. So we ended up with about 60 lbs of fresh produce including a bunch of items we would never cook and eat.
After a long conversation that was a real stretch for my limited Spanish and relied heavily on "lo siento" (I am sorry) and "no mas por favor" (no more please), we managed to shed about 20 lbs of pumpkin and other squash.
And now the BIG tree...
While I was negotiating (pleading for mercy) in Spanish, the girls discovered a flying buttress tree and climbed onto the roots so I could take a picture. Interestingly, there are multiple species of tree in the rain forest that send out these massive roots along the ground. It is a strategy not only for stability for giant trees in soil that can become saturated, but also to gather nutrients from the widest possible area since rain forest soil has extremely low nutrient density.
And now back to our produce story...
Having negotiated our way down to only 40 lbs of produce, the girls and I stuffed the backpack to the breaking point and strapped in on April. Fiona took a big pineapple in one arm and a massive papaya in the other like two very heavy babies, and I carried the crate with everything else.
We went about two hundred meters and stopped at Cafe Suerta for a smoothie and some rest, then another two hundred meters to the Rio Claro bridge and finally, up the rocky hill that passes as the road to our house.
When we got home and started school for the day, Fiona said, "Daddy, my arms are too tired to lift my pencil"!
Opportunities to build character are priceless.
Adios!