“Pitahaya” is not a Spanish word but rather a word from the indigenous people of Costa Rica and what everyone calls this unusual fruit or flower growing on a cactus plant. It is used most popularly in bebidas or fruit drinks like American Smoothies and the fruit is called “Dragon Fruit” or “Pitaya” in the states. The inside is gelatin like and pink in color with tiny black seeds and very sweet.
The photo is of one David brought to Spanish class the other day and I thought I would share another one of out unusual foods here in Costa Rica (and all over Latin America and in Asia). Read about it on Wikipedia (en español) or in English as pitaya/dragon fruit.
While in Alajuela the other day I heard music in the gazebo of Central Park and found local teens breakdancing with a boombox in the gazebo. I tried to get a couple of shots with my phone and they aren’t very good, but an interesting part of culture here as especially the young adapt cultural activities and music from other cultures & countries around the world. Truly, it’s a small world!¡Es un mundo pequeño!
Central Park Alajuela with the big white gazebo on the other side.
Breakdancing in Alajuela
A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.
Variegated Squirrel – La ardilla centroamericana (Sciurus variegatoides)
Yeah, I know, that’s what old men do – watch squirrels in the park! 🙂 But I haven’t done that until recently and snapped a few shots with my phone camera. These are called Variegated Squirrels in English, the most common squirrel all over Costa Rica. I hope that in the future I will sit in the park more whether watching people or squirrels or just relaxing or reading. It is a good place to be! To be in nature and to be in community. And eventually we will have a newly remodeled park which will necessitate more photos! 🙂
Note that we also have a lot of birds in the park also with parrots coming to the tops of one group of palms at one particular time of year and we also have had some Montezuma Oropendola nests in another part of the small park. I’m hoping they keep the trees with the remodeling!
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
~John Muir
Rough translation of sign in park: “Celebrate your life, take care of nature”
This vacant lot looks like it is being made into a parking lot and if so, parkers will have the colorful mural on one side of where they park. We don’t have a lot of parking lots in Atenas with the old-fashion expectation of parking on the street, but as we grow and more people get cars, parking lots are becoming a necessity. I’m repeating the image here since the use in the large header crops too much off the ends of my panorama shot, plus with photos inside the article you can click to see fullscreen:
And the meaning of the mural? I don’t try to interpret art. I just like that it is bright and colorful – representative of the spirit of Atenas! 🙂
The above link is a really interesting article in one of our online English newspapers. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree which will only grow 20 ° north or south of the equator and in the correct amount of humidity. Central America and particularly Costa Rica are perfect for that. West Africa has been good for cocoa, but global warming, higher temperatures and the desertification of West Africa along with some plant diseases there may someday, possibly by 2050, eliminate all cocoa farming in West Africa. They are experimenting with hybrid plants there says this month’s National Geographic magazine, but already people are saying the resulting chocolate is not as good.
Cacao is grown all over Costa Rica as small family farm businesses and by some of the indigenous peoples as I described in my recent visit to the Bribri Watsi village and earlier from my visit to Bribri Yorkin as we watched their children suck the sweet white stuff from around the cacao beans and we tried it ourselves.
If you ever visit Costa Rica there are many chocolate tours you can take to learn the complicated process for making one of the world’s favorite sweets.
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz
A large number of expats living in Atenas depend upon a local Facebook Group called Atenas Costa Rica Info and the administrator recently asked for photo submissions to be used as the header on the group page – photos made of or in Atenas. I submitted about 10 and 2 of mine placed in the top 10 as voted on by local users of the group. The above sunset photo placed 3rd and the below dancers placed 5th in the contest.
And the winner is . . .
And the winning photo was of this Oro Tree in the front yard of one of the local expats, Walter Wengrowich. It is beautiful and a good choice, representative of Atenas! I’m glad he won and owns such a beautiful tree!
“Photography is the story I fail to put into words.”
— Destin Sparks
Even though WordPress websites have photo galleries and I could put all my photos on the website – my original plan – so far they do not have the flexibilities and quality options that I have with my SmugMug.com photo gallery which recently purchased and incorporated Flickr where I also still have a small class-related gallery. https://www.flickr.com/photos/charliedoggett/ I will eventually close it, even though free.
Currently I Have 2 Large Online Photo Galleries
Now back in my first 12 years of retirement in Tennessee I chose to use the online photo gallery called Pbase, which the Nashville Photography Club used. Images I sold in galleries and arts & crafts fairs are there in 5 categories plus all my travel photos by trip, and others. It is a great database type program with lots of sub-sub-gallery possibilities, etc. but not quite as user-friendly or as visually attractive as SmugMug which I chose as my new photo gallery after moving to Costa Rica and comparing several online galleries, thus came Charlie Doggett’s COSTA RICA, which has had only Costa Rica photos thus far.
Move Both Galleries With Website & Blog or Not?
This year when I decided to move my website AND blog to WordPress (from Joomla & Blogger), I really wanted to move all my photo galleries here too – the luxury of everything in one place! And WordPress has that option! But I quickly learned that the more photos I put on this site, the slower it runs! And that is with me reducing the size of most photos since the web does not need large files, but then they are not good for you to download and print if you want. While I upload full-size photos to SmugMug & Pbase that are not only good for you to download and use but they are big enough (except some zoomed in birds) for you to use the SmugMug “BUY” Button and order prints, wall art, etc.
Thus I changed my mind and decided to not move my photos to the new website. Though I will continue to use photos on the site & blog (web-sized), since photography is central to almost anything I do or write about.
One Gallery As a Linked Part of the Website
So on the top MENU of this site is the 3rd item GALLERY, which is a link to my SmugMug Gallery that I want to become my only gallery. And what about the hundreds of photos still on Pbase? Well I started with some of the Family History photos as inefficient little galleries within this website’s articles, adding to the slowdown. Then I decided to move all of those to the SmugMug gallery which is created to handle a volume of pix. That means I have now started my first non-Costa Rica gallery inside my Costa Rica gallery! 🙂
Only the first two sub-galleries are moved now from Pbase and they are both a part of the web pages Family History that includes much more like cemeteries and stories from WWII, etc. While the other two sub-galleries will eventually have their own web pages and likewise include a lot of other information! So lot’s of work still to do here. Keeps me out of trouble! 🙂
More Non-Costa Rica Galleries Coming!
One of my “Best Sellers” in Arts & Crafts Fairs in TN
Then I anticipate at least two more non-Costa Rica sub-galleries on SmugMug:
These too will be related to and linked from pages on this personal website. Eventually it will seem like my whole life is reported somewhere on this website. I cannot explain why I have a passion to do this, but somehow I am driven to complete it all long before I die. It is like my passion for nature, travel, photography, stories, my family history and reporting on it all here!
Here’s the LINK to the photo book of my trip two weeks ago: Caribe Tuanis Click title to REVIEW the book electronically in my bookstore, all pages for free! Best seen at Full Screen!
Jumping at Bribri Watsi Waterfall
The title is my fusion of two Costa Rica slang words and is not grammatically correct Spanish! One Tico tried to get me to add “El” like “The” in English. No. “Caribe” is CR slang or short for Caribbean which I think is used in English some also and the slang word “Tuanis” is like the American slang of earlier years “Cool.” So my English translation of the title would be “Caribbean Cool.”
Three-toed Sloth this year – Rare face shot
Since my last year’s book on the Caribbean was all birds and nature, I wanted to do something different this year, featuring teens jumping off a waterfall and surfers riding the waves plus Bribri Indigenous People, and of course the Rastas of all Caribbean Culture. Enjoy!
Well, not really “business” but “contact information” for people I relate to here and how to get to my photos and blog which is a little simpler with everything now at my website, charliedoggett.net – I like this card better than earlier ones!
FrontBack
No place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. ~Robert Adams
The Atenas Expats Men’s Club had another trip Saturday and I participated, the first time in several months. A bus load of us traveled to San Jose for a lunch stop at El Rodeo and then the afternoon at a portion of the two-day International 2018 Costa Rica Open Dance Fest, an annual event and contest (like “Dancing With the Stars”) that attracts contestants from most of the Latin American countries and the United States. We saw just a small portion or about 3 hours worth.
This time I’m asking you to go to my photo gallery on the event:
