Our morning's activity today was a visit to the Museo de Cultura Popular, the Museum of Popular Culture. We started the day off by cooking these delicious coconut cookies, that I'm sure would make my (real) dad's mouth water, and then proceeded onto to explore the museum. Though I don't know if I'd really call it a museum. I have a feeling that this mostly happened simply because we didn't have a great guide, but I'm not really sure what the museum was about.
Our guide began by explaining to us that this was not a museum of tangible objects, but rather a museum of smells, touches, experiences, etc., which seemed to make sense at first when you looked back at our experience of cooking the coconut cookies. All too soon however, I lost him. There were some pretty cool things that he showed us, but it seemed to be a random hodge podge as we walked around a field with a building in the middle of it.
One of the first things he showed us was this plant that grew these fruit-like bulbs, that looked a little like mamones chinos, that if you broke open, you would find small berries that had a red dye in them that people used for clothing and as make-up. Well, that cleared up the question of whether or not there was blood on his pants, we figured it was just the red dye. He also showed us how to know when a coffee bean is ripe for picking.
Next, he set us loose into a house with all of it's doors and windows closed and told us to open all of them. All of them were barred with a bar that came up and off of two supports on either side of the opening, which meant that when I tried to open a door in pitch black, the bar obviously fell and crashed to the ground. In response, the guide himself came crashing through the door I somehow managed to open to make sure everything was alright.
The house was a bit random as well, but some artifacts he brought out were cool. One was a ceramic doll with the number 13 and a horseshoe on the side. In American culture, this would be considered unlucky, but in Costa Rican culture, the number 13 is lucky, and the horseshoe as well. The moral of the story was that it all depends on perspective. This was followed by a can that was similar to a watering can, but the spout went downwards instead of up. We learned that this was to help bathe babies and pregnant women in the olden days. The last artifact was a wooden egg, which is apparently used for darning socks and by putting it in their nests, making chickens think they already laid an egg and responding to this by laying more.
Then, quite abruptly, the tour ended. It was interesting, but the concept of the museum, as the museum claims to be itself, was just a little too intangible for me.
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