Life and such

July 6, 2010

Typical meals:

•Breakfast: Freshly blended juice (orange, tomate del arbol, babaco or melon), instant coffee, pansito (toasted croissant type thing with cheese) and an egg (fried, hardboiled, and hardboiled with a soft gooey center)
•Lunch: some kind of light broth soup with potatoes meat and some veggies, main course almost always has rice and potatoes and some cut up veggies. The meat is the part that changes. Options are (not that I get to pick, it is whatever the house or the restaurant has) pork, beef, chicken, rooster, bull, cuy (guinea pig), hot dog, fish and rabbit.
•Dinner: pretty much the same general ingredients but the style in which they are cooked and presented varies. After dinner we usually have agua remedia, to help with digestion and other internal problems. Seems to work well, if anything it is more water to drink.

My family never drinks any kind of liquid during dinner, I find this odd. Apparently it is a cultural thing. I barely made it through tonight’s dinner of three boiled potatoes (size of baseballs) with no toppings, cooked meat and corn, with a drink. I don’t know how they do it. It felt like trying to eat a whole packet of saltine crackers without water. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about the food, it is great, I just like to have some kind of liquid to wash it down.

New stuff I have eaten:
•Pig intestines (so it uncooked first… looked the same after cooking)
•Pig heart (better than the intestines)
•Chicken stomach (miles ahead of pig organs in the taste good race)
•Parts of one of our roosters that El Capitan (the good fighter) killed in the yard
•Babaco (it is a fruit)
•Tomate del arbol (also a fruit)

I am sure I will be trying more stuff soon. My host dad keeps teasing me that we are going to eat a cat the neighbor has. It will probably end up on a plate in front of me someday escorted by a healthy serving of rice and hopefully a drink. Oh well.

Bien provecho!