Aero: Kelly Bailey – Costa Rica 2016 – Food and Dining
Creative Commons Image via The LEAF Project
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The food Mayra cooked us was always delicious. Without fail every meal included rice and beans. Yes, that includes breakfast! In the mornings she would usually made us eggs and pre-toasted toast, which was just hard bread. For dinner we would always have some sort of meat with rice and beans, and a vegetable. The Vegetable was served raw just cut up. Literally several times at the table was just a plate of tomato’s. I never in a million years would think of fresh sliced tomatoes as a dish to serve for dinner. Each time we always ate almost all of the vegetable. Maybe Americans should serve more plates of vegetables, it might cut down on obesity.
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Kelly Bailey
The drinks were always made in a blender and served in a big pitcher. Sometimes it was juice other time was water mixed with some powered flavoring. I almost always loved it! I felt like I got to try some new invented drink every meal.
When we went out to eat a lot of places served casado which is a Costa Rica dish of meat, salad, rice, and beans. The name casado means married in Spanish, and the plate gets its name because they say it takes to people to eat the whole thing. I enjoyed most meals, but my favorite has to have been the steak I got in Nicaragua. The steak was tender and served with sweet plantains. Yum! I loved that steak, but I did not eat the rice and beans that came with it. By the ninth or tenth day I was getting really sick of rice and bean, Metaphorically and physically.
After leaving Costa Rica I started to have some digestive issue. I was not alone in my constipation, several other students were experiencing the same stomach pain and lack of relief. I laugh about it now, but I think it will be a long while before I eat rice and beans again. Nicaraguan and Costa Rican food was very similar. When in Nicaragua I was much more paranoid about drinking bad water. The tour guides and the whole group echoed my concern. I believe the infrastructure in Costa Rica is that much better that water purification is more reliable.
Kelly Bailey
LEAF Contributor
ML@FLCC: Costa Rica 2016
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