Coffee cherries - Costa Rica #25

@Lorraine: The coffee beans are actually inside the cherries. Cool, yes? Our guide had us peel a cherry, pull out the slippery coffee bean and chew on it. They taste a lot better after they're dried. LOL

@Judy: No, the cherry contains the bean. It's really cool. We each peeled a coffee cherry and then popped the slippery beans into our mouths. It took two attempts for my son and me. The beans are really slippery and went flying. Our guide thought we were hilarious. Crazy people couldn't hold onto their coffee beans. Hubby is okay. I think I'll keep him. :)

@jamesy: Yes, *sigh*, just day two. I may have to come up with a separate blog, like I did after we returned from Alaska. It took me 3 months to write about a mere 7-day trip, but I had a lot of photos and a lot of stories worth telling.

@grouser: Chewed on it. It was kind of yucky. All that cooking apparently does something truly majestic to coffee beans.

@Richard_Irwin: Thanks! After I posted it and went back to look at the photo (to see if it was okay, because sometimes I think a photo looks good and then once it's up I cringe), I thought, "Oh, thank goodness his nails were clean."

@Ravi: Thank you! I really appreciated my husband's help on this shot.

@Earnest: LOL! I know! You really have to wonder how on earth people came up with the complicated process that eventually makes the stufff taste good. Our guide said it was the Arabians who discovered coffee (hence "Arabica", the first coffee beans). He said some sheep were running around looking crazy and bug-eyed, so the shepherds decided to find out what on earth they were eating and try it for themselves. It turns out the leaves of coffee plants are poisonous to humans and the sheep were eating the leaves, so I'd imagine it took a while to get to the end result.

@peter: Well, I don't have 2000 *good* photos, though. The rainforest pictures were pretty much a disaster because it was really, really dark and I didn't take a tripod along. It rained, at one point, and my husband took a look at me after it stopped raining and started laughing. "You look like a drowned rat!" he said. And, he took my camera so that he could snap a photo of Drowned Rat Bookfool. You can imagine how eager I am to show off photos like that. LOL Not!