JANUARY 2

The eggs this morning had green stuff in them. While I pride myself on being much less of a picky eater than I was 10 years ago…green stuff in eggs is typically onions or peppers, which are two green things I don’t eat. So I ate two rolls, drank a little pineapple juice (I mistook it for lemonade) and called that a meal.

Now on to the chocolate factory. Doesn’t look like a chocolate factory, does it?


Apparently most of the world’s chocolate comes from Africa and the ivory coast. Think “slave labor.” Here in Ecuador, the company we visited does chocolate in an eco-friendly/non-profit sort of way, as they are working to help the farmers of the Amazon region with sustainable agriculture. They even have a high school out in the jungle where they teach some of this stuff. It’s a boarding school, and tuition is $8 a year…or a sack of corn. So I could skip a meal and send a kid to school for a year. Now we all know I’m never going to skip a meal, but I could still afford to send some kid to school for a year, so I’m going to check out that website.

Hairnets!


free sample!




Chocolate process (as best I remember it):
Apparently they harvest the cocoa beans (which come from a fruit). They put the beans and the pulp they were found in into a box. It ferments for five days. Then they dry out the beans. I think they’re technically called cacao at this point. Beans dry on platforms for 8-10 days. Then the beans get shipped to this factory…

In these black bags


They toast them in an oven. Then they break them up


Then they put them through this “machine”. It blows air through the bottom, and they break the cacao beans over the top, press them through the sifter, and the air blows the lighter weight shells out of the way, and the chocolatey part (called nibs) fall to the bottom.


At this point, in normal chocolate world, the nibs are ground up into a paste, and sugar and preservatives and all kinds of bad stuff are added, and then you get creamy chocolate bars from Hershey. But at the jungle chocolate factory in Ecuador they don’t add all the bad stuff. They add other natural things, like macadamia nuts, pineapple, raisins, and coffee (most which come from Ecuador and the surrounding countries).

Ovens


Then they sell it to the granola freaks in California. Okay really they sell them to distributors, mostly free trade. There’s a private label that puts their own name and packaging on them, but they’re a big buyer and it’s non-profit, so whatever pays the bills.


p.s. this font is called “Sand” and it should never be used. Ever.




We got to try some samples and buy a few things if we wanted. I managed to pick up one of the three actual chocolate bars left (they were short handed with the recent holiday). I also got this weird packet of 80% cacao, 20% sugar, which has a recipe on it to make hot chocolate, which if I lived in a cold climate would likely be my life force.


And I got a little box of the chocolate and macadamia nuts, because that was the only mixture that sounded appetizing to me.

SOMEONE’S GOT A SPANISH BABY


Then we were dropped off in the Mariscal, which is a touristy area. I’m not sure what we were expecting, perhaps more of an open market type place like in China. But this was just a main street, with the occasional souvenir shop, so somewhat of a disappointment. We’re going to an open market later in the trip though, so I’m sure we’ll survive.








fun shop




tried on cool hats






Lunch at the hotel (perhaps my last meal there, at this rate). A starter soup that was white corn and potato, a little bland.


Then a pork, rice, and pickled broccoli dish. The meat and rice were okay, the pickled broccoli not so much.

We had cantaloupe juice to drink. It actually wasn’t that bad, but it’s not exactly a thirst quencher and it was something you could only sip, not gulp. Good flavor, but not what I want to wash a meal down.


I brought up our less than stellar meals at the hotel with the tour director, hopefully not sounding too insulting. Nothing has been inedible, I guess I’m just looking for some fantastic cuisine and I find it hard to believe that Ecuador doesn’t have any. But I was informed that we were having very common foods and that meals here are simple. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but perhaps just a little more flavor. And based on some of the smells that have wafted up from the street food, I know they are capable of cooking something appetizing.

After lunch we headed out for a cable car ride up a mountain so we could view the city…assuming the view was unobstructed. Our luck of course, the mountain top was shrouded in fog.


The ride up was rather scenic, it soon turned cool and visibility dropped substantially.










At the top I had some fantastic hot chocolate.




Took a few pics of the fog, and a few pics of random dogs (there are a lot of them).






Then rode back down.








There’s an amusement park at the bottom of the cable ride that we probably would have enjoyed more, but there wasn’t time to explore. When this thing was all built, they thought it would be some huge tourist attraction, so there was this amusement park, and all types of shops at the top and bottom of the cable car. However, after a few months of all the Ecuadorians taking in the view, business dropped substantially and most of the shops closed. So the whole thing is a bit barren.






The bus brought us back to the hotel, but dropped a few of us off early to grab some ice cream. I went out on a limb and got a scoop of something foreign (naranjilla) and a scoop of something familiar (chocolate with chocolate chips). Naranjilla was described to me by my Ecuadorian friend Freddy, as the bastard love child of a strawberry and an orange, with the sugar removed. Naranjilla flavored ice cream was…not bad. The flavor itself was fine, I’m just not a very fruity-ice-cream type person, and the flavor was a bit strong to enjoy for more than a few licks. So after awhile I was totally lame and pushed the top scoop off, and then enjoyed the chocolate chip.


Back to the hotel, dinner at 7:30pm. The soup starter was vegetable, and tasted about the same as the corn soup from lunch. Entrée was a chewy beef and gravy, with rice and salad. I put down some of the rice and gravy, and vowed to go back to the Crepes and Waffles place tomorrow. Dessert was actually pretty a good, a chocolate mousse that was very sweet and was almost the consistency of sorbet.

Salsa lessons. Pretty fun.