Balloons, pig blood and enchiladas

Somehow I skipped over writing about all of these things last week. This weekend hasn’t been extraordinarily exciting but the week before was a little more eventful. The school hosted a really super fancy lunch for the foreign kids that cost us about 3 USD and it was really nice. They had a mariachi band come in and play for us and men that were all dressed up serve us and take our plates and we had fancy little desserts (mostly consisting of coconut or chile powder). The food was amazing. And then they gave us balloons. So, three dollars got us quite a bit, and got a few of us out of class for a couple hours. We had fun.

Asami won a shirt that is super cool but like 8 sizes too big for her

 The Saturday before last, we had the opportunity to go with Ely to the indoor mercado (market) in La Cruz to pick up some ingredients that she needed to make enchiladas. It was a definite cultural focal point in my time here. When you first walk in, there are so many people and so many smells, its hard not to get taken away in the excitement of the place if you don’t initially remember why you came. Thankfully, Ely knew exactly what she wanted. We first went and bought chiles, as you can see in the picture, they had quite a selection, as well as dried shrimp, which were huge! I had never seen dried shrimp before.

Next we ventured over to this smorgasbord mountain of fruits and vegetables that towered above us. We had to look up, past the mass of delicious fruit to talk to the people to tell them what we wanted. It felt like a dream. There were so many different kinds of fruits that I had never even seen before. The US is missing out, I’m telling you.

Huge shrimp!

Indoor market

So much fruit!!

But as we walked around getting the ingredients that we needed, we kept passing meat vendors that had scores of meat that was just hanging from their stands, out in the open without any refrigeration. The smell of it was so strong it made my stomach drop. With some of it, you could pretty easily tell what kind of animal it came from. They had a lamb hanging, fully in tact, eyes and all, hanging by its feet at one of the stands. I think the only difference between where I saw it and what it looked like alive was that it was skinned. It was pretty disturbing. But nobody really thinks anything of it. It’s just one of the ways people buy meat down there. I didn’t really feel like eating meat the rest of the day. When I mentioned it to one of my professors, he looked a little embarrassed, or hurt, maybe and said that the meat isn’t hanging there for more than a day. It’s fresh. But still. It was a little gross.

If you guessed these were pig heads and pig feet...you were right.

Pigs.

This butcher really wanted to pose for me. haha

Thankfully, the enchiladas that Ely and her mom made were meatless. They were incredibly good and incredibly traditional. They used the chiles to dye the tortillas, so the tortillas have this mild spice to them that was so tasty. We filled the enchiladas with cheese and onions and used mashed potatoes, lettuce carrots as a base to eat them with. SO GOOD. I really just can’t stop talking about the food here. I’ve never eaten so well in my entire life.

Ely and I cutting up carrots for enchiladas! Yum!