Chocolate and Monkeys

I've been getting busier and busier, so I do fewer interesting things besides work, but this week has been good. Milagros, the new teacher in the Jardin, is here now, so I'm her teaching assistant, which I like better. I like my work here and enjoy doing it, but am officially cured of thinking about majoring in elementary ed (though I'd already decided against it anyway). There's also a new group of volunteers here from Rochester New York doing a health study.
One fun thing we did do was learn how to make hot chocolate from scratch. Literally. We have a cocoa tree in our backyard. You start out by picking the pods and cutting them open (they're kind of like gourds), then you suck on the seeds. They're covered in this kind of slimy white coating that is sweet and tangy and actually pretty good. Don't bit the seeds though--nasty. You spit all the seeds into a bowl and let them ferment for a couple days (it makes them sweeter), then spread them outside to dry in the sun. Ants and things crawl on them, which is disconcerting, but doesn't adctually matter because of the rest of the process. After the seeds are dry you toast them for about 20 minutes (in our case over a wood burning fire, because Flora likes that better even though she has a gas stove too) until they're all black, then take them off the fire and peel them while they're still hot, which gets your hands very sooty. Then Flora has a little hand grinder machine (kind of the the apple spiraler) and we ground up the beans into a powder, put them in hot water with sugar and milk, and had a delicious drink that doesn't taste much at all like hot chocolate in the states. It was fun :)
Today we got to go on a jungle cruise. The real deal :) Canoes on a little branch of the river with native guides who don't speak English showing us the monkeys (yes Brindy, Parker, and Gracie, I have now officially seen monkeys. No, I didn't catch one, because they were up too high). We also got to swing on a giant vine swing they have there and just the jungle. I took lots of pictures, but honestly they just can't capture it. Too many of the cool things are too three dimensional for a camera to capture. I also got to fulfill a dream I didn't know I had of climbing trees in the jungle, though not quite as much as I would have liked to. It was a fun outing :)