Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Week 9 - Double Fried. Twice.

You all know me. You know that I love food, but am not terribly hard to please. You know that my tastes tend to skew to the exotic, the flavorful, and the guilty pleasures. So when I tell you that Saturday’s dinner was too much, even for me, please take that not as a sign that I have somehow become pickier, but that I simply am no match for the Guatemalan food pyramid.

I should probably preface this anecdote with the fact that I was diagnosed with Giardia, a parasite transmitted via fecal/oral contamination, about a week and a half ago. I’ve beaten it (with a little help from my friends and a staggeringly large dose of antibiotics), but after the second stomach parasite in as many months, the Peace Corps is rightly getting a little worried about me. Of course, they practically skipped over the fact that I ate, at some point, a little piece of someone’s number two, but they seemed—for a while—gravely concerned that I might have something called “Malabsorption,” which is rather technical but basically means that my intestines aren’t doing their job because I’ve been sick for so long.

“Now Joe,” the staff nurse began, “I’m sure you already know this, but Uncle Sam is paying for your medical bills, so I feel obligated to remind you. Please stick only to bland food for the next couple days. Avoid anything spicy, with dairy in it, and most of all greasy. You should be thinking bread, rice, and bananas, not fried chicken and sugar, mmkay?”

“No problem,” I told her. “It shouldn’t be too hard to stick to those dietary restrictions, especially around here.”

A day passed, and Doña Mayra called me down for dinner. I had, of course, made her aware that I wasn’t feeling well and my stomach couldn’t be strained. I sat, smelling the rich aromas of her kitchen, looking forward to whatever magic she’d done with the insipid foods I was allowed. My plate was put before me. It appears to be some kind of empanada (called dobladas here, which means “folded”), something that I’ve not yet seen here, but remember fondly from the days when my brother’s Spanish tutor would cook for us years ago. It’s a fried dish, but it appeared to be reasonably grease-free. Beside it were two things that may or may not have been eggs. I’ve never seen them quite so…deep fried.

Now, I appreciate a good egg as much as anyone. Ask anyone who knows me and you’ll learn that most of my brain food comes from some variation of the fried egg sandwich. Almost by definition a fried egg must be at least a little greasy. Still, it is no match for a fried egg that has subsequently been deep fried. A double fried egg. Two of them.

With a resigned sigh, I bit into it, knowing that if I didn’t I would offend my host family, whose respect I’m really trying to gain. It would be a bad idea, I reckoned, but so be it. There are worse things that a little upset stomach. Grease ran down my face in little rivulets. Wiping it away I reached for a doblada. Even grasping it gently between two fingers, grease squirted out. So much for grease-free.

Huh, I though while biting into it. This is interesting. Most fried things typically don’t have another fried thing in them, so I was quite surprised to find a pork rind nestled comfortably in its crispy tortilla blanket. Pork rinds, and I could be wrong on this, are pig fat (and skin?) that has been deep fried. Once again, I found myself eating something fried inside of something that had been fried. I began to gag a little bit.

I somehow got through it, mostly by alternating bites of the meal with bites of bread (which I later found out is made with generous helpings of lard). Surprisingly, I only had a mild-to-moderate stomach ache for the next 12 hours. What I find so hilarious, though, is that despite eating food like this on a more regular basis than I’d care to admit, I’ve lost 15 to 20 pounds. Perhaps that will put my sickness into a little more perspective.

Sunday was another free day, the nine hour phenomenon we get bimonthly that is about as close to a weekend as we get. Our training cohort is getting closer and closer, but we get to hang out with each other so infrequently that it’s truly a treat to go to Antigua and pack as much living into as few hours as possible. We still need to return home before dark, which means getting on the bus no later than 6pm, but we have some truly epic lunches. Meals like the above make one, for lack of a stronger word, ravenous for light and vegetable-centric foods. Salads are a prized commodity among us, and no expense is spared in the pursuit of such divine perfection. Add a bottle of wine and it’s almost like we’re able to cook for ourselves again.

Of course, by 3 or 4 in the afternoon most people were done eating, no matter how leisurely they polished off the last of the hummus and pita wedges. Spread by word-of-mouth, more and more began to meander over to the Ocelot, a jazz bar run by Peace Corps-friendly American expats with the best all day happy hour in town. I felt so sophisticated to be sitting in a cosmopolitan city, letting the cool carbonation of a Cuba libre tickle my throat while surrounded by the swirl of banter and music. None of those sensations are terribly out of the ordinary from my old life, but it felt really great to be surrounded by compatriots in such a trying enterprise as the Peace Corps enjoying a few of  the finer things in life.

That’s all I’ve got for now, though I’ve been struck a lot this week by how much I feel like I’ve changed since arriving; it’s amazing how many deep thoughts you can have while swinging back and forth in a hammock at a macadamia farm. I’ll be done with training in two weeks, but it’s scary and exhilarating to think how different I’ll be in two years.

Also, Two of my dearest friends, Becca D. and Heather C., have, as of today, began their own service with the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. I’m not going to post their contact information for the whole world to see, but if you know them, please consider giving them the same wonderfully heartfelt sentiments you gave me when I began my own epic journey. They’re a lot more poised than I am, so maybe they’re so full of excitement and optimism that they’re inured to preoccupation. I, however, was shitting myself—almost as literally as I am now that I’m here.

PS, per usual, please peruse this week’s photos at your convenience. They can be found at https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week9?authkey=Gv1sRgCKGU64n7mqGvTg#.

No comments:

Post a Comment