It's Trevor's Birthday! Got up and had a great pancake breakfast and headed out to see Orlando's fathers farm. It was so cool! They are super sustainable and live off of all the food from their farm including the fruit and everything. They had all types of animals: cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, a horse, and a bunch of other birds. Some brand new chickens that were only a day old were there when we arrived and we learned how they are slaughtered when they get to 6 weeks and saw all the stages of growth in between. Then we checked out how they are prepared for the market - the feathers are taken off and the innerds are gutted similar to a fish. All done by hand. As we were taking it all in, we were oblivious to the fact that more chickens required slaughtering and before we knew it was had knives in our hand. It was a pretty crazy experience. Another neat thing on the farm were these plants that folded up upon human contact as a defence mechanism. They were all over the cows grazing fields and were super neat. After the farm visit and our first real farming experience, we came home to an unexpected decorated house for Trevor's birthday. This was followed by a special meal where beef from the farm was made on a briquette BBQ to eat along with tortillas and salsa...and cervezas to celebrate of course. Amazing. A funny fact: we learned that part of the reason the Spanish speaking people have a hard time with Trevor's name is because of its similarity to the Spanish word 'trebol' which means '4 leaf clover'. Because of this, the theme of his birthday today resembled a St. Patrick's day celebration back home. After the initial celebrations we went off to see how another farm operates. It had larger equipment, but similar practises. It was all really cool to learn about. The children were all super excited and we threw a lot of lemons around with them. Good times. On the farm they had a pet Crocodile which was somewhat underwhelming but still quite neat. To wrap things up, we went for a traditional snack in town with savoury syrup and some sort of cake with a deep fried bread. Delicious. The food here has yet to disappoint. It was then 6pm and we heard the church bells ring. One of the kids piped up and said 'I bet we can go to the bell tower and see everything'....and that we did. It was an old church and the bells are rung manually every hour by two old men. They even had the old bell down. It was 250 years old and had a huge crack which had since been welded. We would never be allowed to do something like that in Canada. Then there was a parade. Tomorrow is Independence Day so I guess that should have been expected. They seem to celebrate for weeks here. Back at the house we exchanged more stories and played with the kids until dinner where we ate Pan Con Pollo and Trevor got to attack his piñata. What a riot. They build those things much better here. Took a solid 15 mins and 4 people to finally break it open for the candy explosion. Then it was time for cake. Trev got a nice big bow tie on and sat down and did the whole singing and candle thing. Then one of the lady's smashed Trevor's head into in the cake. Priceless! I love these people. The night ended with another cerveza or two and we said our goodbyes to some newly made friends as we will be leaving in the morning. Such a good day, probably the best one yet. Everything was so kind and genuine. Today will not be forgotten.
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