The international business concentration these past few weeks has been very interesting and entertaining. We´ve visited various places to learn about how international business is being done here in Costa Rica, including a flower farm named Esmeralda, a coffee company named Café Britt, a foreign investment attracting organization called CINDE, Intel, Earth University, an ecotourism hotspring place called Ecotermales, and a hotel called Hotel La Fortuna. It´s hard to believe that I am getting credit for some of the things I am doing!At Esmeralda, we were given a tour of the farm and saw how the whole process of planting, growing, cutting, packing, shipping, and exporting flowers works. It was pretty neat, but seemed a lot more like a factory than a 'farm'.

Cafe Britt by far was the coolest site visit we've done because we were able to talk to the owner about how he started his whole business. Cafe Britt started off just as a coffee growing place, but now their coffee and other products, like chocolate covered espresso beans, are all over Costa Rica. All their products are delicious! We also took part in their famous theatric tour which was follwed by an amazing lunch buffet. We spent the past few days in San Carlos, which is where Vocan Arenal is. This was the view out my hotel balcony:Oh yeah, Arenal is an active volcano...so we saw it spew some smoke a few times, which was real exciting!The hot spring place that we visited, Ecotermales, was run by this amazing guy who is doing a whole bunch of innovative things to make his ecotourism joint sustainable. For example, he makes his own biofuel out of human waste, and he explained to us how it is done. It was pretty impressive.

Then we got to experience the hotsprings ourselves... The place was really nice!And here is a picture of all of us students who are in the IBC.