Today after class we visited a macadamia nut farm. It was a few miles outside of town. We took a bus with an adminstrator with our school. He is really great. I guess he gives tours and accompanies students on tours, but we seem to be almost the only students right now. IT is still the rainy season and not as many tourists and students as there will be later. So it is awesome, we get personalized tours! He speaks english, mas o menos. I try not to speak spanish to him all the time, because my dad can{t really understand. But I try to speak spanish most of the time with whoever I meet. So we went to this farm today. It is beautiful, and very laid-back. It is rainy season here, which i think is like 5 months long. everything is lush and verdant. he has all kinds of trees, and the nut trees grow all over. The owner has been there I think 15 years, I forget. He{s from california and is pretty . . . anti-establishment, I guess. Maybe bordering on anarchist. He has very strong ideas about genetically modified plants and food crops (they are bad), paying taxes (bad) and buying houses (bad. he and his wife have lived in a trailor on the farm for who knows how long). He gave us samples of their macadamian nuts and they were delicious, and chocolate from nearby, which was awesome, and some assistants there gave us face messages with nut oil. He gave us a little tour of the little factory, where they husk or whatever the nuts, sort them by size and dry them. some they dip in boiling salt water for 30 seconds to season, and they are awesome. It{s an environmental cause for this guy, because he said the nut shells absorb huge quantities of carbon, and also a social program. This is a much more lucrative crop than corn or coffee, and they give many sapling trees to poor rural pueblos en guatemala. It was really fun. We had a typical guatemalan dish for lunch, like a spicy red soup with chicken and this small green squash like a pumpkin, called pepian. Que rico!
He said you{re only as big as the love in your heart.