Wednesday, February 28, 2024

The Off Putter

Question: the thing that puts me off, that's an off putter, right? Or is it an off puter? Because I don't want a putter like I'm golfing. But I don't want some slangy way to say computer either. I mean putter as in that which puts. Off, in this instance.

Earlier in this month I was put off from blogging by an incident. I was going to blog about the Parque de Carolina. It is a large and beautiful park in Quito. And it has everything. Okay maybe not everything, I didn't see a helipad or roller coaster. But it has:

  • Soccer fields
  • Volleyball courts
  • Track
  • BMX track
  • Skate park
  • American football field (though clearly unused)
  • Paddle boats and a paddle boat stream
  • Science museum
  • Botanical garden
  • Vivarium


 

A Bell of World Peace - in the park

Point is this is a very lovely place. And I wanted to blog all about it.

But for the incident which occurred in the park.

I got pick pocketed. My wallet was stolen.

So this isn't life or death. I had $10 in cash. The thief got credit cards and probably did get some money with those but I don't have to lose that money so that's good. And my driver's license was in there.

So while that wasn't a tragedy it did leave a metaphorical sour taste in my mouth. It has also caused some slight modification to our plans, nothing major. More on that in a future post.

That incident kept me from having much desire to blog for a bit. But I am on the comeback trail.

Story: When Carver was four, he loved to play War. You know the card game where you flip cards and the higher one wins the cards. Sometimes when I was losing but then something went in my favor I would say I was on the comeback trail. And Carver, in his early days of learning how to talk trash would say no, instead I was on the go away trail. Put me in my place.

But that was a place putter, not an off putter. And regardless of which trail I am on now, think of this post as an up catcher. Or an on putter.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

By Way of Africa?

The date was February 11. It was a Sunday. And an amazing coincidence happened. In truth it was of no life shattering consequences. But it was unusual enough that I took notice.

That day Alrica and I traveled from Quito, Ecuador to Lima, Peru. We took a plane. The two cities aren't that far from one another. So why did we go by way of Africa?

That would be mysterious, right. Well it didn't happen, not in terms of physical location. We were in or above South America the whole time.

But in the car ride to the airport in Quito, our driver turned on a radio station playing American music of the 80s and thereabouts. For example, we experienced a total eclipse of the heart. But we also blessed the rains down in Africa.

When we landed in Lima we took a car ride from the airport. Different car, I promise. But this driver also turned on American radio from the 80s and vicinity. This time I was watching you (with every step you took, every move your mook, every bond you brook.) But guess what, we once again blessed the rains down in Africa!

Twice in one day! In two different countries, neither of which are secret hotbeds of the English language.

It was enough to catch my notice. And I wonder if it could ever go the other way. Could I hear songs about South America while in Africa. Are there any songs whose lyrics include the name South America? Is this a gnawing absence in need of repair? Here is my attempt to address the issue.

I bless the maize in South America.
It could be choclo and it might be mote too.
Some maize is purple, some is white, and some is blue.
Come cook with maize in South America.

Void filled!

Saturday, February 3, 2024

The Mixed Stomach

When it comes to Ecuadorian food, it’s really a mixed bag. But since the ultimate bag is my stomach, it is a mixed stomach. Some things in Ecuador are amazing. A couple things are not to my taste. But the majority of traditional Ecuadorian cooking is fine. It’s not bad, it’s just not… flavorful. Sometimes my tongue screams, “Discover cumin and garlic and oregano!”

So for my tastes, which I am sure differ from those of the Ecuadorian people, I would group Ecuadorian foods into three major categories: the good, the bad, and the bland.

The good: First and foremost, the fruits here are varied and wonderful. Some of them are very sweet, like maracuyá (passion fruit). Others are very tart, like taxo (I don’t know it’s English name). Some of them are both sweet and tart, like uvillas (which I have seen translated as gooseberries, but when I think of gooseberries it’s not this.)

And as the fruits are so good, so are the juices of those fruits. That’s not a surprise, right? But along with fruit juices, you know what else is just better here? Powerade. They have better flavors of Powerade in Ecuador. Instead of fruit punch, you have tropical fruits and it tastes better. Instead of whatever our orange one is, here it is maracuyá citrus. The addition of the maracuyá flavor (chemical no doubt) just improves it. You go Powerade!

Leaving drinks, encebollado is a seafood soup. It is very good, and it is served with lime and a lime juicer. You can add your freshly squeezed lime juice to taste. Sour soups are amazing.

Breads are wonderful here in much the same way that they are at home. But here, you can buy small fresh breads (like croissants about 1.5 times the size) at most any corner minimarket. Or you can go to a panaderia, a bakery, and buy them there.

Chifa is a genre of cuisine. It is Chinese food. But it is more properly a fusion of Chinese and Peruvian food. Chifa is generally built around a serving of chaulafan. This is fried rice, and it is dark and usually has some meat in it. Often that is shrimp, but it could be something else. Then you can get something along side your chaulafan which is similar to the kinds of things you get at Chinese restaurants in America. There are chicken dishes, or pork, or seafood, or beef. They come in flavorful sauces and with lots of vegetables. But here is where it gets weird. At the chifa place we tried, this is also served with French fries. (They call them papas which means potatoes.) Don’t misunderstand, it is very good. But I am unused to serving both rice and French fries as sides (or maybe the rice is the entrée and the meat is the side) on the same plate.

Pizza is good enough here to be on the good list. The toppings are great. The cheese is mozzarella which is very similar to, but slightly different from, the mozzarella to which I have become accustomed. It has a slight aroma of being a goat cheese rather than a cow cheese. (Why don’t we say cow cheese. We say goat cheese if it comes from a goat. But we don’t mention the cow when the milk came from a cow. We just call it cheese. Are cows missing out on their right to recognition? Then again, maybe it is like not putting a little two on a square root sign. It is the default, so we don’t bother.) The thing that holds pizza back in Ecuador from being as good as at home is the sauce. The sauces aren’t as seasoned. There is oregano, but not as much oregano. There is garlic, but not as much garlic. In fact, there isn’t even as much sauce. More sauce, please!

Chocolate is certainly a thing here. In Ecuador it is very high in cocoa content, and also expensive in comparison to other Ecuadorian prices. But if you like chocolates that have a lot more chocolate than you are used to in American candy, then it is for you.

The bad: I personally did not like ceviche. I know it has many devotees and I don’t want to say it isn’t good. I will just say it isn’t good to my tastebuds. But it is something you should try, because you might love it. Alrica enjoys it. What is ceviche? It is fish, but rather than cooking it (denaturing it with heat) you soak it in citrus juice. This also denatures it. There is some debate about whether or not it eliminates all the bacteria. After it is denatured, various spices like chili pepper and garlic are added. (See, they do know about garlic.) And it is often served with chopped onions in it. And I like chili peppers and garlic and onions. But I still didn’t like ceviche. More than the sum of its part, as the old saw says. (I know saws don’t talk.)

Next up, lemonade. Okay, this shouldn’t properly be in the bad category, because bad isn’t the right word. When you order limonada at a restaurant in Ecuador, there’s no sugar in it. It is lemon juice (or maybe lime juice) and probably water. But you better be ready for sour!

I ordered habas con queso which literally translates to beans with cheese. I was very curious as to how this would be prepared? How would the cheese be incorporated. What kind of sauce would it be in. I figured it would be like rice and beans. Rice and beans is not literally merely rice and beans. There are other things in it.

Why is this even a meal?

 

Boy, was I wrong. Habas con quest is entirely literal. I got a plate of boiled lima beans with a thick slice of queso fresco sitting on top. Not shredded on top. One thick slice. Now I like beans, but in the rankings of the beans of the world, I think many people would agree with me that lima beans sit at or near the bottom of any such list. Still, even with the world’s worst bean, you could do all kinds of interesting things with them. You could at least boil them in water that had seasoning in it. But no, these beans were cooked and that’s all you can say about them. I like queso fresco, but it cannot save a plate full of unappetizing grass-colored lima beans.

The bland: I find the majority of traditional Ecuadorian cooking to fall in this category. It’s kind of like when you are in London and you wonder why don’t the British season anything. Well, the British and the Ecuadorians are flavor soul mates.

Before I talk about specific Ecuadorean dishes, let me talk about rice. Most dishes are served with rice. Plain rice. Plain white rice. This would be great if, like when you go to an Indian restaurant, there were plenty of sauces on the other parts of the meal that you mix with the rice and eat all together. I’m sure you can guess what I am about to say. That is not the case here. There isn’t enough sauce to mix with all that rice. And there isn’t enough flavor in the sauces to make the rice, well, interesting.

Menestra is the kind of dish I should love. Its main ingredient is lentils. (I’ve read that it can be beans instead, but so far I have only had it with lentils.) Now, I like lentils. And menestra has those lentils cooked in a brown sauce. It is served, you guessed it, with rice, and usually some meat. Either you get a piece of chicken or a slice of beef. It’s so close to being good, but there just isn’t enough seasoning to make the lentils exciting. And then the rice just drags it further down into blandness.

Mote is popular here. You know how grits are made from corn, but if you looked at them, or ate them, you wouldn’t immediately know it was corn. That’s mote. It is like hominy. It’s corn kernels that have been peeled and boiled. (I’m not sure which comes first.) It is chewy in an unexpected way, and it isn’t super flavorful. Usually mote is served with some sort of meat.

Locro de papa is a potato and cheese soup. We held out high hopes that this would be the traditional Ecuadorean food that tipped the scales toward yummy. But it didn’t. It’s fine, but it’s not amazing. Locro de papa is usually served with sliced avocado, so that has some flavor.

It looks like it's going to be good

 

I know you’ll think this is lame, but one of my favorite meals in Quito has been fried chicken at KFC. Why? Because they use the exact secret mix of eleven herbs and spices that Colonel Sanders formulated all those years ago. And that’s about ten herbs and spices more than I get in anything else.

But I wouldn’t say my mixed stomach is suffering. I get enough food and it is plenty nutritious. It’s really my tongue that dreams of something better.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

American Comparison Day

Familiarity breeds contempt, so says the idiom. But familiarity can also breed comfort. So says I. And I hope that I am neither an idiom nor an idiot.

Today, Alrica and I decided on an American comparison day. We wanted to see how certain Ecuadorian experiences of American-y things compared or contrasted to the American-y experiences of the American-y things. (I do recognize that American-y is not a word. Not only that, I am taking an adjective and adding the letter y to the end to make it more adjective-y. I make no apologies. Because I am not apology-y.)

They don't have our Thanksgiving, but they have our Black Friday? Capitalism rules!

 

We visited the Multicentro Shopping Center, also known as a mall. It was laid out in three floors with a central atrium you could look through, very much like some American malls. However, this one was much smaller than the malls at home. It also included kinds of businesses we don’t see in our malls, like an orthodontist’s office or a barber shop.

Shopping and teeth, what convenience!

 

These are the sorts of things we have seen in other places in the world. In fact in December of 2016, my whole family got haircuts at a shopping center barbershop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here’s a blog post about that.

A big difference between malls at home and malls here are the anchors. In the states, the anchor stores of malls tend to be big department stores like Macy’s or big sporting goods stores like Dick’s. But they don’t tend to be grocery stores. In fact, grocery stores in malls is almost unheard of in the USA. But that’s not the case in many other countries. And in Ecuador, the big anchor store was SuperMaxi, a grocery store.

We went into the SuperMaxi to buy a few things. The grocery store is much like the ones we have at home, aside from everything being labeled, as you might expect, in Spanish. But one thing that was new to me was hanging fishnet bags of vegetables. Mm, I want a sexy stocking full of potatoes! Oh papa! (Papa is Spanish for potato.)

Admit it, those are some sexy potatoes. Well, each has appeal.

 

We also visited two American classics: McDonald’s and KFC. Here is something very interesting, both of them had a separate counter for postres, desserts. In fact at the McDonalds, the postres counter was outside so drive by traffic could stop for ice cream.

Drive up convenience

 

We didn’t eat at the McDonalds but did check it out. They have kiosks for ordering and you could change the language to English. That was fantastic. However, we were surprised by how expensive the various burgers were. There were a couple of combos you could get for $3.50 which is more in line with the prices of Ecuadorian meals. But several of the items would cost you over $8 for the sandwich alone. That might not be so surprising in America, but in Ecuador that is sticker shock, baby!

The KFC had an upstairs seating area which stretched over its KFC only parking lot. KFC also had kiosks for ordering, but unlike McDonald’s the only language choice was Spanish.

Parking below, eating above

 

Surprisingly, of the two restaurants, the KFC had the bigger play area for children. I wanted to eat at KFC. You may know, KFC is in more countries than any other fast-food chain. I don’t think it has the most locations; I think that is McDonald’s. But it is in more countries than McDonald’s or anyone else. I wanted to know if the chicken tastes the same. Do they really use the Colonel’s secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices? It says on the wall that they do. But is it true?

Would a wall lie to me?

 

I will leave you in suspense on that for a moment. Let me tell you about some of the combos you could buy. You could of course get chicken, but with what? French fries were a choice, not so out there. But several of the combos offered menestra and rice. Menestra is a savory dish made of either lentils or beans. It is usually served with plain white rice, so you can mix the two if you want. I have tried menestra here in Ecuador and it is tasty. But not at KFC. Well, it may be tasty at KFC, but I didn't try it at KFC. I was going for American Comparison Day.

I got a drumstick and thigh with French fries and a 12 ounce Pepsi. (It was in ounces!) My friends, I bring you the news of the Andes. Yes, the chicken at Ecuadorian KFC tastes exactly like the chicken at American KFC. Independent of elevation or latitude, those eleven herbs and spices hit the palate in precisely the same way. It was a little taste of Kentucky in Pichincha. (Pichincha is the province of Ecuador in which Quito is situated.)

Alrica got a sandwich. Also very true to the KFC flavor spectrum.

 

I am not suggesting that Americans abroad should try to eat only American foods. Part of the joy of travel is to try new dishes, like menestra. But let’s not be completely contemptuous of familiarity. Sometimes it helps make being away feel right at home.

Monday, January 22, 2024

Unexpected Differences

When you travel to a foreign country, you expect a lot of things to be different. Like here in Ecuador, of course I expect most things to be written in Spanish. I expect temperatures to be given in degrees Celsius. I expect there are different foods in restaurants and even some of the foods I think I know won’t be quite the same.

But there are unexpected differences too. These aren’t like “Wow, I never would have imagined!” It’s more of day to day things that I never would have imagined, because why would I think about it?

Let’s take an example: Coca-Cola. The Coke here is much like the Coke at home, but they don’t use high-fructose corn syrup. And they use less sugar. It says so right on the bottle: Original Taste, Less Sugar. But this isn’t Diet Coke. It has sugar, just less.

Check out the volume?

 

At home you could look at the nutritional information and get a lot of details you probably don’t retain or care about. Here, the nutritional information is only three things: Sugar, Salt, and Fat. And they don’t give you a precise measurement (not a ratio level of data for my statistician readers), but just a scale: Alto (high), Medio (medium), Bajo (low), or "no contiene" (Doesn't have any). For those keeping track, that is the ordinal level of data. You know, for your edification.

Not the healthiest, huh? Buy hey, no fat!

 

What’s more, you can buy Coke in a 3.05 liter bottle. You can’t do that at home! Incidentally, why are beverages the only things in America that we measure in liters? And it isn’t even consistently all beverages. You can buy Coke in 12 ounce cans but also in two liter bottles. Weird.

Here’s another difference that, had I thought about it, would have been apparent. Ecuador, being situated as its name might imply, on the Equator, does not have Daylight Savings Time. Why would they need it? When your days are always twelve hours long, what would be the point?

I think this difference is leading Google to a savior complex. I was looking at my Google Calendar, and I noticed that these classes I teach at 8 PM Eastern Time were listed at 8 PM Eastern Time up to a point. After that, they were listed at 7 PM Eastern Time. In fact, all of my appointments from a certain date onward were shifted up an hour. I puzzled over this.

My first realization was that the shifted calendar appointments begin in March, just after Daylight Savings Time begins. I think Google is trying to save me! Certainly my Android cellphone knows I am in Ecuador. So Google knows. And it wants me to realize that 8 PM appointments in Eastern Time in the US will really be 7 PM appointments if I am still here. (At least after Daylight Savings Time begins.)

So now I am curious what will happen when I return the U.S. Will Google automatically move all those appointments back? Or will I have to shift them myself? I guess only time will tell. (Pun, get it. “Time” will tell. The time. Of the appointments. Have I over-explained it?)

At least my bad puns haven’t changed. Ah, consistency.

Friday, January 19, 2024

Eaten by a Bear

The trouble with knowing each other through our social media is that our social media lives are stellar. We post the interesting things, the exciting things, our great triumphs, or our fun encounters. We don’t tend to post the other parts of life. And so everyone is jealous of everyone’s life if they only see the social media happy side of it.

This includes our blog. For the most part, I blog about the amazing, interesting, or at least humorous experiences I have had in my travels. I perhaps get too pedantic, but I don’t usually get too pedestrian. No one wants to read about tedium like what settings I use for laundering my clothing or how I get confused as to which key opens which lock. Maybe I am over-generalizing. I shouldn’t say no one wants to read about that. Maybe someone does, but I don’t necessarily want to write about the tedium. (Those of you who would make the valid argument that most everything I write is tedium, well, keep your thoughts to yourself.)

There is a saying that goes “Sometimes you eat the bear. Sometimes the bear eats you.” I think the bear is a metaphor for life. It can’t really mean bear, right? I have actually never eaten bear. I don’t think I have even been in a situation in which bear was a menu choice. Also, while I am sure some people are, in fact, eaten by bears, it isn’t exactly common enough that we carry around bear repellent. I don’t think I know anyone personally who was eaten by (or had a loved one eaten by) a bear. So let’s all accept the bear as a metaphor and say sometimes you win at life and sometimes you don’t.

At present, I would say the bear is tucking a napkin into her collar and picking up her fork and knife. So in the spirit of #unvarnishedlife let me blog a bit about when travels aren’t going all that well.

I will begin with another idiom, “Into every life a little germ must fall.” (I know it is supposed to be rain, and it does rain here. But germ is more appropriate in this context.) Early this week I got sick. It really wasn’t terrible. No fever, no stomach pains, no headaches. But I completely lost my voice. I was also slightly fatigued. And the muscles where my spine and skull meet were not happy with me looking any direction but straight ahead.

This was awkward. For one thing, we are living in an apartment on the third floor. To get here involves walking up 38 steps. (Not quite Hitchcock.) Even pre-germ, the altitude sickness from being at 9,650 feet above sea-level meant we needed a moment to catch our breaths after each ascent. Now with my fatigue, well, that moment grows into a siesta.

Still, this didn’t stop Alrica and I from going out. We tend to go out for lunch each day. In Ecuador, almuerzo (lunch) is the big meal of the day, not dinner. Here, it is more cost effective to go out for lunch than to cook (at least in a place you’ve rented that doesn’t have any spices. I don’t want to buy spices only to leave them when we leave.) Now, I am no master of Spanish, but I tend to understand it and speak it better than Alrica. She took German when she was in school and that does her very little good in Ecuador. So my being unable to speak made things, let’s say, trickier.

However, here is one amusing sight I saw as we were out. And I have a whole story to go along with it. We must travel back in time to when I was in high school. My AP American History teacher was, I'll be gentle, not good. Early in the year she decided which students she liked and were good at the subject and which were not. She didn’t pay much attention to the assignments we turned in, and she tended to give us work that took up tons of time with very little learning.

One thing she started was giving out these sheets that had names of historical figures, names of places where historical events happened, or names of historical events. And we had to scour available resources to write a paragraph about each of these names on the worksheet. Mind you, this was pre-Google. This was when scouring meant finding books in libraries. And there were about forty names each week. So this took up a ton of time.

I had a friend in the class, Abdul. I still have Abdul as a friend. Well, Abdul and I realized that Mrs. C (see how I protect her identity) never read any of the worksheet answers. She just put a grade on them based on, who knows, her reading of tea leaves, and then handed them back. So we decided that rather than treating each name as a miniature research project, we would treat each name as a creative writing assignment. We made things up.

And it worked. Week after week, we got reasonably good grades, even though we hadn’t taken the assignment remotely seriously. That is until Marshall Ferdinand Foch. He was a name on one of the worksheets when we were studying World War I. If you don’t know, he was, at times during World War I, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces. Foch is known for having been very courageous and ordering his troops to do some pretty reckless things. But they worked! Go Foch.

I didn’t know this when I was taking AP American History. And I didn’t bother to find out. Both Abdul and I wrote something based on the similarity of the name Foch to another four-letter word. After all, how do you think military blunders came to be know as Foch Ups?

I am sure you can see where this is going. This was the week that Mrs. C finally looked at the worksheets. Needless to say, she found our answers far less amusing than we did. Punishment ensued.

I bring this up because I am living near Plaza Foch in Quito, named, as I am sure you guessed, for Ferdinand Foch. In fact, many of the streets in this part of town are named for military leaders who fought the good fight. Not too far away is Jorge Washington Street. But back to Plaza Foch. While walking through it the other day, I saw this on one of the walls:

What the Foch?

 

Not only is this amusing in the same way that Abdul and I were amusing all those years ago, but it always interests me on another level when the puns in a non-English speaking country only make sense in English. I recognize that English is a lingua franca of the world, though here in Ecuador, almost no one speaks it. How many people find that joke funny? Maybe in this case it turns bawdy, lowest common denominator humor into something that only the select, in-the-know few can appreciate like certain fine wines which only true connoisseurs can appreciate for their subtle bouquet.

Enough of that tangent, back to the bear. Through the healing salve of time and the extrication through expectoration of a good deal of phlegm (which is a word you don’t find in just any blog, my friends), my voice is improving. I can’t yet master my Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget imitation, nor my Gizmo from The Gremlins. But when I just talk normally, I sound like a slightly scratchy version of myself.

But the bear wasn’t done with us. Yesterday, Alrica got very sick; we think most likely food poisoning. Her stomach was in agony, no position was comfortable, she could barely sleep, and other things. (If you were squeamish about me mentioning phlegm, I will just let your imagination fill in “other things.”) Note: I considered putting “other things” in single quotes just to make Alrica go a bit crazy, but since the bear is already upon her, I decided to she had enough on her plate. Or she was enough on the bear's plate.

So, at this moment, we are not having the best time in Quito. Alrica isn’t up for going out. I made lunch at home, and it was terrible. I bought pasta and pasta sauce at the grocery store. But the pasta sauces here aren’t like the ones we have at home. I bought this one, a brand called Los Andes.

No bueno

 

The Andes Mountains are not a region of the world one associates with high-quality Italian seasonings. That should have been my warning. Whoever the chef at Los Andes is that was put in charge of formulating their spaghetti sauce, I can only imagine it is someone who has never eaten spaghetti. They did know that the base is supposed to involve tomatoes, but beyond that, I think it was guesswork. What we end up with is something closer on the scale to barbecue sauce than spaghetti sauce, but even that is a generous description of its qualities (or, in truth, lack thereof.)

I recognize that my treatment of this fine Los Andes chef is a bit unfair. After all, the United States has many Italian immigrants and their descendants to carry on the fine tradition of sauce making a la the Italian palette. Ecuador does not.

Still, I ended up throwing much of my pasta away. And Alrica, who needs to eat as her stomach is more or less a vacuum at this juncture, found my lunch offerings insufficient to overcome her natural revulsion at foods in her present state.

So, yeah, the bear is enjoying her feast and we are the victuals. But this too shall pass. As soon as my vocal chords are back at one-hundred percent, I’ll let that ursine beast know who’s boss. In my best Dr. Claw impersonation, she will hear me growl, “I’ll get you next time, Bear. Next tiiiiiiiiime!”

Exit, pursued by bear.

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Market Marked Differences

What it means to go to the market can vary from place to place. When we were traveling with our kids from 2015 to 2017 we often when to the market. There were different words for them, and there were different styles. We even have them in the United States.

Of course, there is the supermarket. You find that in most (but not all) places. They are not all entirely the same, but they aren’t all that different either.

Whereas the market can be quite different. In the United States we have farmer’s markets in which farms send people with goods to sell from a stand on certain days of the week. Some of them are temporary; they build the stand and take it down each time. You can find these in many cities. Other places, the stands are permanent and inside a building. Though it is generally not open seven days a week (or even five), they are open multiple times during the week. This is closer to the market we find in other countries.

One big difference is that these markets tend to be open every day. (Sometimes closed on whichever day is the Sabbath for that country.) They are usually much larger than the markets in the States. Some are laid out with meat sellers spread around and fruit sellers spread around and baked good sellers spread around. Others are more like department stores. There is a fruit section and all the fruit vendors are around that. There is a meat section and all the meat sellers are there.

Also what many of these markets have is a food court. They might call it various things, but that’s what it is. Here you find stands with prepared foods along the walls or the pillars and then tables throughout the area where you can sit to eat. Just like the food court in the mall, right? Well, there are differences.

Mercado Santa Clara - flower section and fruit section

 

Yesterday, Alrica and I went to Mercado Santa Clara. This is a market of the sort I was describing, what here is called a Municipal Market. This market is set up in sections, a fruit area, flower area, dry goods area, meat area (on the middle floor) and at the top is the patio de comidas (the food court.) There are entrances from the street which take you in at the bottom level (fruit, flowers, dry goods). There are other entrances from the street which take you up exterior stairs and land you in the patio de comidas.

We got lunch in the patio de comidas. Alrica had a rice dish and I don’t know what it was called. I got Caldo de Gallina (which is chicken soup with some delicious grain in it.) But they don’t cut up the chicken into bits. They must use chicken to make the broth, but when it is served, they put a quarter chicken in it, skin and all. I got a drumstick and thigh with my soup. This would be fine, except the only utensil I received was a spoon. I guess you eat it with your hands? That’s what I did.

I found the patio de comidas overwhelming. There were many choices and I walked around seeing what I could have. Of course, multiple stands were serving the same things. But one key difference here is that many of the stands have a woman shouting at you. You could just read the sign that tells you what they serve. But in addition, the woman is calling out the items on the menu. Even when I was within three feet of her, trying to read the sign, she was still shouting, and facing me. And this goes on all around the patio de comidas. So, the space is loud and difficult to concentrate in.

For the locals, this is probably the norm. They didn’t see bothered at all by it. For me, I had a hard time reading the signs and decided what to eat within the cacophony.

I discovered other differences too. You say what you want but then they don’t give it to you. Someone walks you to a table and sets it down there. You ask how much it costs and then give that person your money who goes away to make change. I assumed I was supposed to follow her to get my change. That was apparently not the case. They weren’t mad, but it was apparent I was not following the social norm.

Here is another difference in the market, imprecision. This isn’t meant to be deprecating. In some ways, this is wonderful. Let me explain.

Alrica bought some red bananas. Side note: Much like when we were in India, we are experiencing many types of bananas here in Ecuador. In the U.S. you only get one variety, the cavendish. But here there are finger banana and red bananas and more that I don’t know the names of. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled blogpost.

Alrica asked for cuatro, four of the red bananas. But the woman at the fruit stand took a huge bunch of them and just broke off a piece. (Not four of them, it was actually five because that was easier to break off.) At an American market, these would then be weighed and a price per pound would be used to calculate what you owe. No, here she breaks it off and looks at it and says it will cost one dollar.

Red bananas, Cherimoya, Uvillas, Tuna (not the fish, the prickly pair)

 

We have found this at the fruit stands throughout the city. They don’t seem overly concerned about weighing most items. (They weigh things like berries, but not much else.) They just give you a price, usually rounded to the nearest quarter.

I like that imprecision. I’ve often thought in the U.S. that if I just peeled my bananas before I got to the register, think of how much money I would save. Yes, my bananas would get smushed and rotten, but I’d just have to eat them fast. Here, that’s not a concern. So long as no one is yelling at me from three feet away.