Hornado (Sat 14/07/07)

Today, my family and I headed out to Sangolqui which is about 45min away from quito, but right near Danilo´s university which he goes to every day (so far away to go daily, but i guess necessary) to try Hornado, a famous local dish. I´m not sure where to start in describing it, so here´s a pic to get it started:


Graphic hey?





So basically out the front of the restaurant there´s this really long table that is holding this huge variety of food they use to compile different plates that people order. Hornado is all about the pork and it´s really weird to just see the entire pig just lying out there like that, all deep fried or roasted or whatever they do to it and there´s like no meat left since it´s been all picked off - it´s just this shell of crackling and the head. Totally weird, but it was really nice. The final plate that we got, which is a mixed plate, has the ubiquitous mote (the huge white corn kernels that are kind of mushy, but pretty nice), the chancho (pork) on top, with half an avocado, this mash potato thing and a roasted platano (banana). They say I´m becoming more ecuadorian because each time I eat, I use more and more of the aji, which is the spicy salsa sauce that´s everywhere on every table - it´s like the ecuadorian soy sauce. Hopefully the mum is going to teach me how to make it so i can make it for everyone back home.

Anyway, so that was our outing for today. When we got back home, Luis wanted to show me something, and so he went back into his back flat thing, and came out this massive machete! Totally bizarre - here´s some pics:


poor Tina (the dog)

Ready for some cuteness?


Awwwwww......soooo cute.... One of the Tina´s two puppies

Anyway, after the machete display (and there was also an axe involved as well), Luis, Dario (the other worker guy who sometimes lives here) and I went around the back street and played basketball with what else, but of course a soccer ball. =) It was pretty funny because it was me against Dario and Luis since they said I was so much taller than them - so anyway, long story short (well actually it was a short game), I won ;) Nah, but it was cool to play basketball, but then we played futbol and of course they kicked my ass and in fact they came closer to getting the ball through the hoop when they were kicking than when they were actually shooting it with their hands.

So, with this week past, it was a very different week than the other ones because a new volunteer started on Monday. She´s this lady from Canada, 55yrs old, and a teacher back in Calgary and on her summer vacation and thought she´d come over and volunteer in Ecuador. She´s got so many really cool travel stories - sounds like she´s been heaps of places in her life - London for two years, Greece, Turkey, Galapagos Islands etc etc - it´s pretty cool. Her spanish is at about my level too, so both of us together are trying to piece together everything the doctors and patients are asking us and I think we´re getting a good handle on it. It was actually good this week because Kathy brought all these leftover prizes from her school to give to the kids here, and so when we saw this girl basically being dragged into the dentists´office, we thought this was a perfect opportunity to introduce a reward system. So, eventually we managed to explain what we wanted to do to the dentists, and so now everytime a kid under 10 has been to the dentist and was good, then they can come to us and we give them a choice of prizes. It´s really cute because they´re all really shy and especially since some of them are traumatised after just coming out of the dentist ;) , they just quietly take their pencil case or pencil or whatever and leave, but it´s still totally cute and I´m glad that we now have a role to play with the actual kids. It´s also really good having another new person at the clinic, because there´s nothing like a new person to make you feel like an experienced old hand around the place, which is actually really good thing. It´s also really funny because Kathy is really bold and she´ll just charge in and attempt to speak spanish to everybody about anything, and so that´s also good to have someone like that there too, because then doesn´t make me feel so embarrassed about my own level of spanish. We´re both trying and the doctors and everyone can see that, so that´s pretty cool.

Here´s just another random pic from this week:


They really tell it like it is here in Ecuador =)

Oh yeah, also on Friday the mum and me went out to the old city centre and visited some of the churches, which had just way too much gold for my liking and then a couple museums. The banking money museum started out promisingly with the guide saying that he could speak english, but this is how it progressed: "So good morning my name is ... and I´ll be your guide today" and then from that point on it was all spanish - lovely. So I actually didn´t understand anything, but it was all pretty self-explanatory - this coin progressed to this coin to this note etc etc. The museum after that was actually quite good I thought - really good displays and stuff - it was all about teh history of the city of Quito, but the thing was that very few of the displays were actually sign posted, even in spanish (there was no english to be seen) and the guide we had didn´t speak any english, so I spent the next hour trying to piece together what was happening, but ah well, it doesn´t matter. I got the general gist...I think.