Aero: Brianna Cardina – Costa Rica 2016 – Food and Dining

Creative Commons Image via The LEAF Project

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The food in Costa Rica was quite good! It was different from what I eat every day. Rice and beans came with many of our meals, and a day without it felt odd. At times, we didn’t know what we were eating so we came up with our own words.

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Brianna Cardina

The Chayote is a vegetable that I’ve never heard of until Costa Rica. Neither did my exchange friends know what it was, so after we ate it, we named it the “Water-Potato” because that’s what it tasted like! I find it crazy how there are still so many types of fruits and veggies out there that we don’t know of, and it blew my mind when we all had that interesting flavored water-potato. There was another food that I never knew about – the plantain. A plantain is like a banana, but tastes less sweet. When we were with our host family or at a restaurant, it was common to have fried plantains. It wasn’t my favorite dish, because I wasn’t used to the idea of frying fruit. Also, they were like bananas and chips put together. Crunchy, but soft on the inside. It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it was cool!

Homemade food was the best. There is a saying about how grandma’s cooking is better than any restaurant food, and I can agree. Our host grandmother made us very good dishes. I loved it when she made traditional dishes for us too! Especially her empanadas, we had them for breakfast (even if they were a pretty greasy food for the first meal of the day). At one point, all of the students were invited over to another host family’s house, and we were all taught how to make tortillas! It was so cool, learning how to make them. There were a lot more steps than I thought there would be, but it was well worth the time spent doing it. Our tortillas were way better than store bought ones, hands down.

I can’t say much for etiquette at the dinner table, because our host family didn’t eat with us. We had our own table, and didn’t eat at the same time as them. I wish we could’ve eaten meals together, but they were probably busy or had already eaten.

Going out to eat at restaurants was pretty much the same as the US. The only difference is the food. Restaurant food was good, but honestly it got tiring after a while. Our host grandma’s food was the best!

Brianna Cardina
LEAF Contributor
ML@FLCC: Costa Rica 2016

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