This morning was certainly a later start than yesterday. We didn't have to be ready for our full day of lectures at the hotel until 9:30. I was SO excited when I came down to the lobby for breakfast to find that I could have a waffle for breakfast! My day was absolutely made! Our first guest speaker was from CINDE. This stands for the Costa Rica Investment Promotion Agency. This agency has been around for 31 years and attracts high-tech related investments for Costa Rica. They have a five different sectors that they focus on which include life sciences, advanced manufacturing, services, technologies-renewable energy, and projects. In the life sciences sector they provide cardiovascular and vascular parts that are made for Saint Jude Medical services! This was really interesting to me that some of those parts were made here in Costa Rica! Our second guest speaker focused on the importance of tourism in Costa Rica! Tourism in Costa Rica has actually increased by three percent in the past years. Costa Rica has many product lines and services that they provide to tourists in their country. This makes Costa Rica very unique because they have so many different opportunities to offer! I also learned that there are seven providences in Costa Rica. San Jose is located in the Central Valley providence and Tamarindo, where we will be traveling to this weekend, is located in the providence of North Guanacaste. After this guest speaker, we enjoyed a very fancy Costa Rican style lunch! It was really good even though I'm not sure exactly what I ate. Around two o'clock, we had our third guest speaker who works for a company named PROCOMER. He focuses on trade promotion management in Costa Rica. Their main focus is to provide tools to companies so that they can see the benefits that are possible for working with Costa Rican companies. They provide services in many different sectors such as agriculture, food, industrial, and services. They also provide business agendas to companies. These business agendas provide personalized plans for companies who come from other countries to work with Costa Rican companies. They also offer trade agendas who's are similar to business agendas but are provided to up to ten companies at a time. They are also considered to be less personalized than business agendas. Our final presentation was about the economic and social demographics of the Central America region. These presentations provided me with the opportunity to learn about the many things that Costa Rica has to offer to tourists, other countries, and other companies! The most interesting that I heard today was from our third guest speaker. I had no idea that all of the baseballs used in the MLB were made by hand in Costa Rica! Also, Dr.Lanier brought us chocolate covered coffee beans to try! They were actually really good and I don't even like coffee. The only problem is you have to watch how many of them that you eat because they are full of caffeine, but they did help to keep us awake during this long day full of lectures. Today was another great day in Costa Rica! Tomorrow we get to climb to the top of a volcano and visit one of the most visited churches in Costa Rica!
Learning the lingo... De Nada means you're welcome or in other words "it's nothing"
This is our second guest speaker who talked about tourism!
Our fancy set up for our Costa Rican lunch!
The Costa Rican chocolate covered coffee beans. (The white chocolate ones were my favorite!)
No comments:
Post a Comment