Last Days in Antigua- Sunday and Monday

Our last days were pretty low key. Mom looked at the alfombras again on Sunday and I wrote postcards. Monday we wandered around Antigua doing last minute things like going to the post office and trying to sell our books in English.
Monday we took a tuc-tuc out to San Pedro, just outside of Antigua and (eventually) found the grounds to the museums of music and coffee. Given that I sponsored this coffee farm and museum through my daily trips to Starbucks, Mom thought I should see what I was spending all my money on!

This is a working farm with a small museum. It was neat to see the beans from plant (above) to cup. Unfortunately not nearly enough money is given to the farms and farm workers as I would like to belive, but more on that in a second.

First the coffee is picked and the red berries (also known as the cherry) are washed and big machines seperate the beans from the fruit. The big machines to the left are washing and speperating. The machine below is dumping the unusable cherries for disposal.

The beans are then seperated by color, which is an indication of quality. The light beans are best, the darker beans not as good.

Beans have to lay out to dry completely for anywhere from 7-13 days, depending on the weather and how sunny it is.

One way to ensure good drying is to spread them thinlyon the ground for drying and to turn them to ensure all parts get their sun. Here are workers doing that.

Later the beans are seperated from the crunchy dried outer skin and are ready to roasting or exportation. The guide said that 80% of their beans were exported to Starbucks.

Here they are in those familiar coffee bags, ready to go of to parts unknown.

This is from the museum that explains how much of every dollar spend on coffee by the consumer goes to the people who work at putting it in my cup. I'll spell it out because this could be hard to read: $0.16 cents goes to the folks in the producing country (Guatamala), of that $0.08 goes to the far labor, $0.05 goes to the farm, $0.03 goes to the exporter. The remaining $0.84 goes to the folks in the consuming country (U.S.), of that $0.67 goes to the importer, $0.08 goes to the retailer, and $0.06 goes for transportation. This is not for fair trade coffee which makes sure that more money goes to the farm laborers.

After supporting the farm by buying beans and other items from the gift shop we went to the music museum.