Curacao Liqueur

So you have sensed a theme with my last entry have you? I decided that while I'm on my articles will be themed, having to do with my vacation. So how did a liqueur get named after a place? In the late 1400's when the Spanish colonized Curacao one of their many plans for using the island was to grow their beautiful sweet oranges. Little did they know the oranges had another plan. The climate and soil were not good for the plant, the oranges that grew were evil tasting bitter tiny oranges and were abandoned. Not even the islands burgeoning goat population would touch them. At some point in the 1800's someone figured out that even though the oranges sucked the orange skins contained a lot of sweet oil and that when soaked in alcohol (because if it tastes good, lets face it, someone has soaked it in alcohol) thye made curacao liqueur. This alcohol is naturally clear but the company decided their product needed to look more tropical so it is often colored blue or orange.

Who started vacations?

I'm headed to Curacao for a week and so I decided to do some research on the history of vacation in the United States. Who was the brilliant person who came up with this concept of sunshine and laziness. Their isn't really an answer to this. The idea evolved over time and highly religious early america had a love hate relationship with the idea. Originally vacation meant the time where teachers and students were not at school. AKA vacating the school. People would take this time to do other things, often work. By the mid 1800's people start noticing that stress is doing bad things to business men. Doctors start proscribing vacations for peoples health, only people with money can really do this though. With the dawn of the automobile and trains people start thinking about taking farther trips for themselves. Trains companies realize that they can get more business by building hotels at one end of their line. Some religious people are still worried about the idleness of vacation at this time and so some christian groups run hotels offering far fewer temptations, no smoking or drinking and so on. As transportation improved and infrastructure arose vacationing evolved into what it is today.