Feria del Café

This past weekend was the long-awaited coffee fair in Frailes. It didn’t disappoint. There were tons of activities, lots of merchandise, food and snacks, a coffee-picking competition, fireworks shows,a circus act, concerts, and even helicopter tours! It’s by far the biggest event of the year in Frailes and the surrounding areas. I’m really glad I went and that I stayed the night Saturday with my training host family so I could be there for the entire two days. I got to see most of my tico friends from Frailes and several of my Peace Corps friends as well. Unfortunately, many of the Volunteers from my training group live several hours away and couldn’t make it up for the fair.

Most of the fair took place on the soccer field, although the coffee-picking competition was in a finca and the helicopter took off from a different location. Along the perimeter of the field were stands with all kinds of snacks and merchandise pertaining to coffee and other traditional Costa Rican stuff. There were coffee cookies, coffee brownies, coffee candies, coffee pizza and, of course, just regular coffee. The coffee pizza didn’t really taste like coffee; it was just bad. There were also necklaces, bracelets, earrings and crosses made out of coffee beans. Everything seemed reasonably priced and there were several things I saw that I considered buying, but I’m sticking to my plan to buy the bulk of souvenirs towards the end of my service. That way, I’ll know even better than I do now what’s out there, what I want, how much I can get it for, what’s authentic and traditional, etc.

It was cool to walk around the fair with my friend, Tyler, from the business program of the Peace Corps because a lot of the people selling merchandise there are going to be working with him since he lives in Frailes. So he was explaining to me how they make everything by hand and how it’s environmentally friendly and whatnot. They all seemed talented and creative, not to mention ambitious, so I imagine he’ll be able to do some great things with them and help them expand their businesses over the next couple of years. One thing they would like to do is start websites and expand their market beyond the Frailes coffee fair once a year and wherever else they sell the rest of the time – probably in markets in San Jose. I’ll share any links I get from Tyler so you guys can start buying stuff made from the world’s best coffee!

The coffee-picking competition was kind’ve anticlimactic. I guess I shouldn’t have been expecting too much since all you’re doing is just watching other people do a menial job but I thought it would be really exciting. I thought it would be an hour or two of intense picking, but as it turns out, the competition in Frailes is the finale of a series of competitions in other places and they only pick for fifteen minutes in each location. I got there right when it was supposed to start, but for whatever reason we had to wait an hour for it to begin; like everything else here, things just run on a different schedule than what I’m used to. Apparently, not only do you have to pick fast, but you have to pick the high quality beans. If you end up with a lot of greens or leaves and twigs in your basket, you get disqualified or have points deducted or something. They announced the winners of the competition at the end of the fair. There were three places for each sex: 3^rd place received $100, 2^nd place $200 and 1^st place $300. Pretty decent considering that it would take even the best coffee pickers about two weeks to make $300. And slow people like me couldn’t make that much during the entire season, haha!

One of the sponsors of the fair was Stihl and they had a competition to see who could cut the thinnest slice off of a log using one of their chainsaws. It was called ‘la galleta más delgada,’ which means ‘the thinnest cracker!’ A lot of guys tried to cut it too thin and were disqualified when their slice broke off halfway down the log. Tyler’s host dad was one of the participants and he opted to go last because he thought the chainsaw would do better after it had warmed up a bit. I knew Papillo was pretty handy because he constructed his own house, but I didn’t think he would cut the thinnest cracker, but sure enough he did! It was really quite impressive; it couldn’t have been more than a centimeter or two thick.

I was stupid and didn’t check my camera battery before I left so I wasn’t able to take many pictures. But there’s always next year and it should be even bigger and better!