Sunday, April 9, 2006

It's Palm Sunday. Despite the insistences of the screechy American girls on the phone in the Internet cafe who kept wishing their family a happy Easter. ("Yes it is Easter! It is! Happy Easter! No, I saw everyone coming out of church!") Coming out of church with palm crosses, but whatever. It was quite a day in Baños. As I mentioned, Baños is a vacation town for locals, and Palm Sunday is as good a time as any for a vacation, or at least a post-Mass picnic in the park.

I always feel a kind of personal attachment to Palm Sunday. Not for religious reasons, but because I used to help make palm crosses in the family flower shop when I was growing up. It was always cool to feel like I was helping, and then afterwards the unused crosses made fun pretend swords. But all our palm crosses were the same, just the wooden cross shape with fans of palm leaves (stapled by moi) attached.

The palms designs here are many and varied, woven palm baskets and fans and vases with flowers in them, and fantastical cascades of palm leaves and flowers. They are quite reasonably priced as well, starting at ten cents for the grubby, sticky ones offered for sale by grubby, sticky kids, to twenty-five cents for the more elaborate creations sold by adults. But we didn't buy any, nor did we go to church.

What we did do was go to lunch. Which was where a lot of the action was. Everyone in town wanted lunch. Here in Baños, we have rediscovered the joys of the almuerzo, that inexpensive set lunch of soup, meat'n'rice and sweet, sweet soda. (The dinnertime version, often the same food, is called a merienda.) In Baños the almuerzos and meriendas lean heavily to the pollo asado, or rotisserie chicken. And by "leans heavily" I mean, "for crying out loud, isn't there anything to eat here besides rotisserie chicken?"

We squished into the packed asadero with all the staring families and within a minute had giant bowls of chicken soup in front of us. That's the other thing about the almuerzo - the food is constantly being made, so you get that instant gratification. We had barely started in on the delicious rich broth, avoiding the random floating innards, when our main plates of chicken, rice, and menestra (bean stew, in this case lentils - GOOD), came out. Then our drinks, orange-colored hummingbird nectar. We always end up with all our food at once, which is fine with me because then I can eat my main plate and go back to the soup later, instead of filling up on soup and then being sorry.

The "buen provecho" phenomenon disappeared a while back, at least for us out-of-the-know foreigners, but it appears to be back. We have been feeling pretty cool to be able to sprinkle around the "buen provechos" as we leave restaurants. It's funny to catch people who had no intention of saying it to us. People always look kind of surprised, and then approving. Sometimes they even choke on their food a little.

By evening much of the crowds had dispersed, but there were still lingering traces of festivities, most notably the many food carts stationed around the squares. Unfortunately for us, they were all identical. And what they were all selling just didn't look gringo-friendly. Some kind of rolls of skin on the grill? And little packets of... round things that I didn't recognize at all.

But as we made our way out to the only hot baths in town (at least according to the LP) we passed a cart selling Michael-friendly food: slabs of meat on a stick, garnished with sections of hot dog on each end and liberally doused with thin mayo and orange hot sauce. Yum. I passed.

The baths, out by Baños's high, thin waterfall, had a really, really long line of people waiting out front. It looked like an hour's wait at least, depending on how long folks around here like to sit in the hot water. And to be honest, not everyone in line looked like people I'd like to take a bath with.

Plus we had to keep in mind that these are not thermal hot springs, with fresh hot water bubbling constantly from Mother Earth, but "baths," wherein the water sits until someone decides to change it.

So we skipped that idea. Too bad because I was looking forward to it. (How is it that we managed to miss all the hot springs in Central America??) Instead we had some more street food, this time a giant, grilled plantain with "white cheese" stuffed into a slit cut down the middle. I never would have thought of the two together, but if there's no risk of a repeat Mondongo Fiasco, I'll try anything. It turned out to be very tasty. Not as good as a nice, hot bath, but tasty.

 

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Breastfeeding, Baños.

Girls dressed up for Palm Sunday, Baños.

Girls, Palm Sunday, Baños.

Michael almost got in trouble for taking this photo of palm baskets. Luckily he was able to show it to the offended party and say, "No cabeza!" Laughs all around. Michael is funny.

Young people, Palm Sunday, Baños.

Old people, Palm Sunday, Baños.

Hats, Palm Sunday, Baños.

Palms, Baños.