Bananas, anyone?
Mamie and I spent yesterday with a wonderful church community harvesting, hauling, and packaging bananas. Plantains, actually, but we’ll also do bananas later. Colombia exports some of the most bananas and plantains in the world, and we are in the heart of bananaland.
We’ll be posting more on the experience, along with lots of photos and videos, but we have a little homework for you. We are constantly asked how much bananas and plantains cost in the US. So maybe you can help us out. How much for a pound of bananas, both on sale and regularly. Plantains? And if you happen to see the price for a full box (they weigh exactly 25 Kilos) that would be great.
Post your findings as comments, and we can get a sample from around the country. We’ll do a later post on the econmics of the whole process. Should be interesting… And if your plantains are marked Turbana – you might be eating the fruit of El Tres Presbyterian Church’s labor!
You Know You’ve Lived in Barranquilla for a While When…
So it has only been a little over 6 months, but I feel like a first crack at a top ten list is in order…
10. The waitresses at Crepes and Waffles seem to recognize you when they take your order.
9. Your calculus for a bus ride is whether the driver is going way the heck too fast, or just too fast.
8. You begin to haggle with taxi drivers over $1000 pesos (50 cents US).
7. Your concept of hot changes from uncomfortable to suffocating.
6. Your concept of cool looks a lot like hot used to look.
5. You consider wearing earplugs to tone down the volume at, well, everywhere (but maybe especially at church…)
4. It no longer seems odd that you have no need for your own songs or speakers to be able to listen to music inside your house.
3. You are able to sort out whether a taxi is honking to tell you to get out of the way or to offer to stop and give you a ride without even looking.
2. You begin to view “just a few ants” in your dry goods as extra protein.
1. You are no longer surprised, though continually grateful, for the kindness and generosity of all the people around you.
***
Just to keep you posted, Richard, Peanut, and I are headed to Brazil today for a mission personnel retreat (we lead a terrible life). We will continue posting on the blog while we are gone through the miracle of post-dating, but we might not manage to get the word out via Facebook. If you read this and post there, help us out, wouldja?
Chicharrón
I generally use this lesson to offer only the definition of the given word in Costeñol, but this word has a few more layers…making it all the more fun to figure out when it gets used in conversation.
“Costeñol Palabra del Dia”
Chicharrón (chee-chah-ROAN): noun -
1. A snack food made of the fried skin of a young pig. In the south we know these as pork rinds, however the packaged variety rarely comes with whiskers attached…
2. Used to note that someone (like Mamie for instance) has gotten a fierce sunburn. Possible sentences include:
“Wow, what a chicharrón!” or ”Put on sunscreen or you will be a chicharrón.”
3. A big problem.
Surely you can find some way to work this into your day tomorrow, right?
And we’re back…
So after a brief holiday pause, we’re back with lots of energy for the new year. We’ll start out with some holiday cooking, as a part two of the “Richard and Latin@ Cooking” series. Look for it soon on cable…
Stoveless Thanksgiving
I will admit that it is a little funny to be in another country where Thanksgiving is just another Thursday. There was a busy buzz around at Reformed University because the school year is ending and upcoming graduation ceremonies, but otherwise things were the same as always. Richard and I had visions of attempted Thanksgiving meals, but in the end we just went out to a yummy restaurant. Most of you all know that cooking is not my number one joy factor anyway, so the idea of putting a feast together on one electric burner without the aid of an oven just did me in. 
So instead we went to Crepes and Waffles and had a yummy meal with the two short-term accompaniers, Phyllis and Faith, who are here through mid-December. We raised a glass in thanks for the family and friends we were missing, for the members of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC) and their kindness to us, and for really stinking good food that we didn’t have to prepare. When you come to visit, all I can say is that we’re getting the Capricho de Maracuya for dessert because it is indeed something to write home about.
We pray you all had a safe and thanks-filled day yesterday, and feel free to eat some leftovers on our behalf. :)
Note (robbed almost directly from my friend Cyndi’s blog…):
We received no compensation from Crepes and Waffles for this post. However, if they offered me a gift card or a discount for my Christmas meal, I wouldn’t say no.
¡Ya Llegamos!
We have arrived!
All is well and we are well-housed for the immediate future in the apartment of Alice Winters who has been serving as mission personnel in Colombia for 30 years. She is currently in the United States and will be headed to Chicago in November, so keep an eye out for her if you are there because she is pretty amazing.
There is a lot we could say – almost too much for me to get my head around – so I will just say that we are grateful to have arrived safely and to be greeted by people from such a wonderful church. There will be more later, but we wanted to make sure to note that we finally made it, gracias a Dios!
A quick sidebar with just a few learnings from our grocery store run today:
- milk comes in a bag
- it is not odd to have only 3 miniscule jars of peanut butter in a whole store
- a car will fit in the produce section
- and it is possible to have 39 brands of mozzarella cheese and no cheddar.
Having fun so far, and we’ll check back in soon, Mamie
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