Final Days and Final Exams

This weekend I was supposed to go to Tena in the Amazon but plans changed. We ended up going to Mindo, a city about 1hr 30min from Quito. There is a lot to do in Mindo. You can ride horses to a waterfall, go rafting or kayaking, visit a chocolate factor or go to a bird sanctuary. I did two of those things… can you guess which ones?

If you said chocolate factory as one of them, you are right! I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see how natural chocolate is made. The second thing we did was go to the bird sanctuary. I loved both activities. The chocolate factory was not very high tech and most of the processes don’t require machines. The beans sit in a hot tent to ferment and then the little pieces of inside chocolate are removed and send to be roasted and broken down further. Then the chocolate gets toasted and pureed. The chocolate that this factory sells is all organic. The chocolates that they sell don’t have milk in them and some have no sugar either. They sell ginger chocolate, spicy pepper chocolate, coffee chocolate and then some with different percentages of sugar.

We got to try pure chocolate and it was very bitter. We were then given a little bit of sugar to mix with the chocolate in our mouths and the flavor was very good. The guide then gave us the 100% chocolate to taste with ginger syrup and it was fabulous.  The tour only cost $5!

The bird sanctuary cost $2 and was beautiful! The variety of colibríes (hummingbirds) was fantastic. I got a bunch of pictures as the birds flew to the feeders. My favorite looking colibrí was green and blue with a White patch on its chest. Another pretty one was red and green. I´ll post pictures when I can!

This week I have most of my finals so it will probably be pretty uneventful. I just presented my final presentation for Andean Archaeology and my professor tore the project apart. We had to present a 15 minute powerpoint on an ancient South American civilization. My partner and I were assigned the Pastos and could barely find information about them. We were required to have good archaeological sources and it was very hard to find any. We did find library book with a lot of information and used that for the majority of our presentation. Unfortunately, our teacher said the book is outdated and a bad source. Funny, since it´s in the school´s library… Anyways, the book said that this civilization talked to demons. We mentioned that in the presentation and our teacher said that was racist of us because it used to be assumed that the civilizations worshiped the devil just because they weren't Christian. Yeah. We explained to her after class that we were going by what the book said and she still kept telling us that the book is a bad source. Oh well.

Tomorrow I have my archaeology exam and I’m freaking out a little because I thought it was only on the material that we covered the second half of the semester but it turns out that it’s cumulative... yikes! Wish me luck.

Cocoa beans

CHOCOLATEEE