Chocolate and Fruit

I remember when we first started talking about chocolate in GST and some of us were thinking about it after clase. We all tried to think about the last time we had chocolate and, for the most part, couldn't come up with a time we'd had chocolate in Costa Rica. Granted, this was only a few weeks into our trip, but compared to the amount of chocolate we would have eaten in the US, this was significant. One person even said that they usually have chocolate pretty much daily in the US, but hadn't really missed it here.
When I talked with my family about chocolate, they pretty much exclusively talked about desserts. My tica mom also noted that everyone is going to be totally wired after class tomorrow since we are all bringing something made with chocolate....truth. Since I was baking for tomorrow, I brought home some scones for my family to try. After a nice complicated conversation trying to describe a scone and what they are for, my mom finally tried one. What she seemed to enjoy most about it was the combination of sweet and "salty" flavoring. According to my mom, tican chocolate dishes are not as overwhelmingly sweet as US-ian dishes. Also, even though she only talked about desserts, my tica mom asked for my scone recipe so that she could make something to eat with her afternoon tea. Since this is a meal that we don't generally have in the US, this was very different. When I told her that scones were commonly eaten for breakfast with coffee in the the States, she seemed shocked and said that she would never eat something so sweet for breakfast. Other than fruit, all of my breakfast foods so far have been salty or rich foods. I have not seen my family use chocolate for anything other than birthday cake.
Honestly, I found the farmer's market to be very similar to some I have been to in the States. The main difference that I found was the culture of attending a farmer's market. While many people in the States have been to a farmer's market, it is not nearly the cultural phenomenon that it is here. Here many more families go regularly than in the US. My family back home used to go to a local market regularly, but there weren't as many regular families as there seemed to be here. There were more often people who thought it would be fun to visit and a cool thing to see every once in a while. The experience in both places is very much a family affair; families work at the tables with parents in charge of collecting money and children in charge of restocking and arranging the wares as well as families coming together to do the shopping. One thing that you would not see at a US-ian farmer's market is meat. We have very strict laws concerning the packaging, preparation, and storage of meat in the US and there would be no way to sell meat in an open environment like this. There was also a man selling pet fish at the market, which I found to be strange. In US-ian markets I have seen all of the other types of stands that I saw at the market here. People selling clothing or trinkets, restaurant style stands, street performers/beggars, all of these are common in the US-ian markets I have visited as well.

A view of the rows of stands at the market. 

Man selling pet fish. 

Meat stands at the market.