Em and Jeff's Adventures

Hangin´ with the Locals

We recently went to our neighbor Irene´s house to celebrate her brother-in-law Luis´s birthday. Irene works in the store next to our school, but lives on the outskirts of Gualaceo, about a fifteen minute walk west of us. Her sister, Janeth and her husband Luis, who is a police officer in a nearby city, have been really friendly and welcoming to us. The celebration lasted all day! We ate crab for lunch, which was an experience to say the least. We discovered that we´d been going about crab eating all wrong after a quick tutorial from Luis about how to break the legs apart and suck out the crab meat. It was messy and delicious!

Next, Jeff, Kyle, Luis, and Luis´s nephew Cristian played a surfing video game while I baked an apple crisp. One oddity in Gualaceo...many people own ovens, but the ovens are non-functioning. We actually took the crisp over to the rival English school in town, which also houses a local family of caretakers where we borrowed their oven. The oven was a lovely shade of robin´s egg blue and reminded me of something you might see in a child´s kitchen. We also had to haul the gas from Irene´s house to the English school. Gas comes in hip-high yellow metal containers, not through the walls. Which is probably a good thing...

They had so much fun entertaining us for lunch, that they invited us for dinner as well! We were treated to a delicious seco (stew) de pollo (chicken), rice, and fresh corn. Then we celebrated with cake and tequilla. What makes a better birthday than a round of tequilla shots?



Irene´s daughter is six. She coquettishly tried on the hat of their empleada domestica (domestic employee) who is treated more like a family member than a servant. She and Irene´s mother cooked and ate side by side. It was one of the nicest relationships I´ve seen. This is probably the closest I´ll get to taking a picture of a Quechua woman in native dress, but who knows? Pretty cute, huh?

posted by Tobias Arthur @ 5:46 PM