Food, Food, Food

So, I really like eating. And I spend much of each day dreaming about the food I might presently, or some time in the distant future, be eating. It therefore seems only fair that I attempt to channel some of this enthusiasm into explaining some of the exciting delicious items we get to consume down here.

Obviously, out of all the cuisines floating around South America, I am most familiar with Ecuadorian/Northern Andean. So in Quito, I had some very specific cravings that needed to be fulfilled, and some old haunts to visit to do it.

One of my favorite places to eat in the Mariscal is Kallari, especially for breakfast. It's run by a sustainable indigenous cooperative based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They make delicious delicious dark chocolate, which is awesome 1) because it can be really hard to find decent chocolate around here sometimes, and 2) because although Ecuador is home to some of the best cacao in the world, most large-scale chocolate production isn't controlled by Ecuadorians. The Ecuadorian beans get sent elsewhere to be processed, packaged, etc., and then the chocolate has to be imported back into Ecuador, and they don't really get much out of the profits. Kallari is really exciting because they grow, harvest, produce, and sell their own stuff. And it's really good.

Anyway, their little cafe in Quito has these great breakfast deals, which always create this horrible dilemma: you can get hot chocolate made with their homegrown stuff kind of melted into hot milk, or you can get juice. And you have to pick.

Juice is maybe the very best part of Ecuadorian food. They have about a zillion fruits to choose from, and all the juice is fresh-squeezed, and it's just amazingly good. And you can get juice made out of strawberries,

which Peter did, and it's in that gigantic glass. Just think about how many strawberries got mushed to make that. Yum. Also we got some standard USA breakfasty items, which is somewhat of a rare thing. Most South Americans eat breakfast of rolls and jam, or sometimes cheese, and instant coffee or tea.

Besides empanadas, which I insisted on eating for pretty much every other meal, what I really couldn't leave Quito without was locro de queso. Soups are another of my favoritist aspects of Ecuadorian cuisine, and locro is my favorite of all the soups. It's kind of a creamy potato soup with chunks of queso fresco (cheese) and potato, and with big ol' slices of avocado on top. I made Peter and Dan go on a locro hunt with me, with excellent results:

Seriously, so good. It's over there on the right. You can also see some empanadas, fried pockets with pretty much whatever you want stuffed inside. The one in front of Dan is an empanada de morocho, which means that the outside is made with morocho, a kind of maize. The red stuff in that little bowl in the center of the table is ají, spicy sauce that's often homemade, and unique to each eatery. Way better than ketchup.

Cuencafied: Or, How to Kill a Day in Southern Ecuador With Luck and Pluck

In our last episode the infant travelers had made it from one city onto a bus. There had been excitement, drama, and loss of sleep, but none to compare with what lay ahead.

Eventually, the bus stopped, Miriam was poked and prodded awake, and we found ourselves in an alley clutching our worldly posessions. The time was something like 6:30 AM, though it was around this point in the trip that we realized neither of us had thought to bring a proper timepiece, and all speculations on the subject would henceforth have to rely on information gathered from the world, or the triangulation of rough times from our respective cameras and iPods. The weather in our new temporary home was hotter than what we had left, and we gazed, dazed, slowly around the alley for approximately ten or fifteen seconds before three new and urgent conversations presented themselves for immediate response.

Our new friends were taxi drivers, and they weren´t interested in waiting for a whole lot of chit-chat, offering all kinds of helpful information and reasons why taxis were essential to our well-being at that instant. I was content to stand like a mannequin and let the sound of their voices splash off of my greasy bus face, and thankfully Miriam, in her glacial state of consciousness, had the good sense to turn to the nearest non-taxi driving person, a little old lady, and ask what a ride to the center of town ought to cost. The quote we received was a hard-driving old lady bargain (something like $2), and it calmed down our taxi friends, one of whom eventually bit.

We slid into a cab adorned with some prayer beads and a little sombrero/flag hanging from the passenger side sun-visor emblazoned with some kind of clear reference to Mexico. Miriam, waking up, and perhaps wanting to to endear us to the driver we were underpaying, asked him pleasantly "So, are you from Mexico?"

"No, I´m from here", he grunted.

Fortunately for all concerned, it turned out that we were not far from the center of Cuenca, and we soon arrived, paid, and slumped down in a beautiful plaza full of monuments, adjacent a couple of cathedrals and still nearly empty of people.

From 2010-02-24

From 2010-02-24

For a few minutes, we floundered. We were still far from Peru, and this situation had to be addressed. However, Cuenca seemed to be a pretty swell town, with more than its fair share of old and new stuff to look at, and hopefully some decent food to eat. We started to wander, deciding at first to take a look around and then try to get back to some kind of bus location to purchase tickets and continue south. Our wandering did not last long. Clearly, we were going to die of whatever kills donkeys and sherpas if we continued to lug around all the silly trash we´d brought to wear and tinker with. So, we started searching the streets for a kind looking hostel that might let us stow our packs for the day for the low, low price of nothing.

On our first try, we succeeded: not at the hostel we tried, but in a neighbor´s hostel/house attic. We happily threw everything we had into some lady´s upstairs storage space and set off to eat avocados and chips along the town´s river. It was glorious. For the rest of the day, we lived up Cuenca. We took videos of our first real experience with the cheap mid-day phenomenon known as the "Menu" (a series of posts that will arrive at some point, I promise), looked at old buildings,

From 2010-02-24

got the lay of the town,

From 2010-02-24

took buses to buy bus tickets,

From 2010-02-24

killed time planning for Peru,

From 2010-02-24

visited some fine museums,

From 2010-02-24

and even created this blog and uploaded the first post from one of their sluggish but cheap internet cafes.

And then, in accordance with the oft-described cyclicity of time, we died (got on another bus) and began our journey toward a new life in Peru, albeit not without drama in utero (Random bus switch followed by closely BORDER CROSSING @ 2AM). Those, of course, are stories for later posts.

Goodnight from a deeply structurally-cracked balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Santiago. Cross your fingers, and try not to think of aftershocks.

Lameness, then Redemption!

I. Lameness

Okay, so we already have a little preliminary, excuse-making, caveat section here at the very top of the blog, but by my watch (an artifact that I do not own) it has been a ridiculous amount of time since we posted anything here, and it's beginning to look as if we've faked the whole thing and are still somewhere between the hotel and JFK painstakingly photoshopping ourselves into other people's vacation pictures scavenged from google images. Thus, here I am, dear reader, to assure one and all that this is not the case, and to stir things up with a shiny new post.

The problem with posting is not currently a lack of material, as we have been scribbling things more or less ferociously at quite respectable intervals into our respective notebooks. The problem is even conceptualizing the difference between where we are now and where we were when last something was posted, not that that date has any particular correspondence to the space-time coordinates of what was actually posted about.

Also, something must be said regarding our current proximity to the singularity. Remember how in 2007 TIME magazine made "You" the person of the year thanks to the rise of a fancy little service allowing every bit of video anyone ever shot to be uploaded, indexed and compared by everyone? We are dreadfully far away from anything like this video+internet phenomenon, we are practically dialing up, we are tantamount to climbing the highest hill available in our given location (in Buenos Aires this would mean taking an elevator to the top of a large building) and morse coding these entries home via laser pointer. Therefore, much of the really tasty meat of the vacation (forgive me, I've been eating way too much grassfed beef), the video archive, will remain unseen perhaps until we return. Something to look forward to.

I believe when last you were spoken to, our story took place somewhere in Ecuador, and our physical presence was already two countries past that in Argentina. We are still in Argentina, and have a couple more days before we head off toward what I can only think to describe as an uncomfortable disaster tour of Chile, providing it does not simply slough off into the Pacific in the next few hours. I'm sure we'll have a good six days.

II. Redemption

Directly following the events described in previous installations of TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com, we spent another day in Quito. Miriam and I rose, somewhat groggy from a late-in-the-evening conversation fueled by not small amounts of cheap beer, packed and waited for friendly co-traveler Dan to return from some mildly dehumanizing bit of national, paper-gathering, bureaucratic nonsense. Apparently the Ecuador model for these sorts of goings-on is designed to function something like a scavenger-hunt with extremely vague goals and extremely rigid and unpredictable windows of opportunity, and after something like four hours, we paid Dan's share and checked out, hoping that he would eventually make it back to the neighborhood. Which he did, having completely failed to obtain the particular bits of paper necessary to appease the great mechanistic god of international relations.

To compensate for this upset, we got some delicious foods

From 2010-02-23

including the first corn that I have really enjoyed in years (choclo), the weirdest and most erratically filled tamale I've ever tasted, and some downright panaceic mate de coca. Bolstered by our meal, we shared a little internet time and then parted ways. Dan headed out to try to find a peanut butter sandwich or something and Miriam and I began our quest to find buses to Peru.

And that's pretty much how the day went, looking for tickets, deciding that said tickets were far too expensive, searching for different tickets, more direct routes, better border crossings, etc. Eventually, roughly two things happened. We discovered that all the buses were pretty much the same, all the routes were pretty much comparable and all the prices were pretty much what we were going to have to pay, so we opted for a bus that would get us out of town at 10 PM and take us as far as Cuenca.

We still had one social activity left in fair Quito, and that was a late lunchish gathering involving the SIT professors from Miriam and Dan's program: Fabian and Siena. This was held at a little middle-eastern joint near the Mariscal, and was thoroughly pleasant, though not as tasty as our brunch.

After this late almuerzo we headed to the bus station to wait, people watch, and catch snippets of overdubbed Big Daddy. Adam Sandler's overdubbed voice is a goofy thing to behold, and they really can't manage to adequately translate his nasaly humor into the big booming voice of the Spanish-speaking, leading actor. Here's a picture of a lady wearing some really creepy jeans in the bus terminal:

From 2010-02-23

After strolling out to eat a most anemic hotdog, largely a pretext for using a bathroom for free, we sat some more, and then tried with increasing exasperation to figure out which bus we were supposed to board for Cuenca. Somehow, magic, luck, and determination swirled together, and poof we were aboard. Miriam snored gently by my side as I watched dubbed Anaconda (a film which is really better this way), contemplated just how low I'd have to amputate my legs in order to continue to travel by bus for the rest of the trip, and read the guidebook entry on deep vein thrombosis....

More to follow!

And for those of you interested in reading a blog that is updated regularly and with nauseating enthusiasm and hilarity, check out: potpied.blogspot.com

Getting There

I started reading Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, which opens with a rant about how annoying it is that all travel narrative only begins once the destination has already been reached, when often the journey there is equally as good a story. Inspired by this, I though I'd share a bit of our dilapidated first steps toward overseas adventuring.

My parents drove us up to NYC so we could easily catch our flight out of JFK the next day, since it left early in the morning and we needed to be there two hours earlier. They told us they'd wake us up about half an hour before the shuttle to the airport left, so we could say our goodbyes and all that. Peter set an alarm in our room just in case, and in the morning we were woken up by scratchy music playing out of the hotel's clock radio. We lay around for a while waiting for my parents to come knock on the door, but since we only had a few minutes to get ready we decided to pack up our stuff. No knock. With five minutes to go before the shuttle left, we went across the hall and knocked on their door, but there was no answer. I started banging on the door, and finally there were sounds of smashing around and bumping things over inside their room. A minute later, two very disheveled and sleepy parents opened the door (pretty sheepishly), having forgotten to wake up at all. Luckily, we had time to say goodbye before sprinting off to catch our shuttle.

We arrived at JFK, and already in the LAN check-in line we stuck out. Most of the people on the two a.m. flights to were South Americans going home or to visit family. One man in line in front of us leaned over to ask us about where we were going, and when we said we were headed to Quito, told us it was really cold there this time of year. This was pretty odd to hear coming from anyone who had been in snow-covered New York. We also had about 1/8 the amount of luggage as everyone else, and Peter had to help the family in front of us push a couple of their bags forward every time as we moved through the line.

The actual flight was quite comfortable. The woman at the check-in counter had obviously noted Peter's rather unusual size and given us seats in the central exit row, so we had all the leg room and none of the responsibility. We also got reasonably edible food, and it felt like flying about 10 years ago. We got to Guayaquil, which was hot and sticky even inside the airport, where we had to wait about 4 hours until our "connecting" flight to Quito. We wandered around outside a little bit, but it was too much of a shock, coming from the snow, to really want to be outside too long. Instead we entertained ourselves by playing games inside, while goofy covers of U2 and the Backstreet Boys serenaded us.

We finally made it to Quito and to the Mariscal, the neighborhood our hostel was in, without a hitch (didn't even have to argue with the taxi driver!). About a block away from the hostel our taxi driver tried to turn the wrong way down a one way street, and on the corner some guy was peeing in the street while his friend pulled on his arm trying to make him stop and a cop looked at him somewhat disapprovingly. Getting to our hostel after that was easy, and after getting settled, we did what any good Americans would do after a long day--went out for burgers, with aji on top.

Catching up with Quito

The first morning in Quito, we were awakened by the once-familiar sound of voices of adults from "Peanuts" comics ("WAHwahwahwahWAHwahwah")--actually vendors mumblingly announcing their wares, which seems like a questionable sales technique but a rather effective alarm clock.

I decided to take Peter to the Parque Carolina, a gigantic park in the middle of the city. We hopped on the Ecovia, one of the many easy and cheap ways to make your way around Quito. We passed by a couple of smaller parks, the Museo del Banco Central, and were making our way into the Centro Historico, the old part of the city, when I realized we had gone the wrong way, and we had to go all the way back past our hostel. At least I got a quick refresher course on the city's layout.

Finally, we made it to Parque Carolina, which was as awesome as I remember, full of colors and tons of people of all ages playing--little kids on snail shaped play structures, older ones on gyroscopes, old men engaged in serious rounds of baci, and, of course, soccer field upon soccer field, for all ages, made of various materials, different sizes, and so on. People sell all kinds of street food (juices and fritada, hunks of pork served with potato pancakes, are some big ones) and delicious smelling carts line the avenues that traverse the park.

After wandering from one end of the park to the other, we reached our intended destination, the botanical garden, which has displays of plants and trees from all the major Ecuadorian climate zones--the Sierra, bosque nublado or cloud forest, paramo, coast, and jungle. At this time of year, many of the plants weren't in full bloom, so the garden wasn't quite as spectacular as I remember. The orchid section, though, was still really impressive, with many of the flowers in tiny, not-yet-full-grown size.

Plaza San Francisco, Quito, Ecuador

This is Miriam, Dan and Peter sauntering around the old city in Quito, Ecuador on the second or third day of the trip. Shortly after this video was shot, we stopped to reapply sunscreen, which we found to be startlingly expensive despite the presence of my surname not once, but twice, on the bottle. After putting a generous layer on her face, arms and upper back, Miriam decided to drop the remainder of the bottle onto the head of an unsuspecting woman nearby. Perhaps for good luck.

One thing to notice in this video is the presence of the Basilica towers from the photos in the previous post. I zoom in on them during the sweep around the plaza.