Saturday, April 15, 2006

Michael's a chicken freak. I don't know why he loves it so much, but he can't get enough. The other day we passed an asadero with especially plump, nice looking chickens slowly revolving in the window. When they reached the top flames licked their skin, so that when they came back down the skin was sizzling. Anyone who's not a vegetarian would have had to agree that that chicken looked particularly toothsome.

So today we went over there for lunch. We ordered at the counter. Our total came to $3.25. Michael gave the woman a five dollar bill. She did not have change. This busy restaurant did not have one dollar and seventy-five cents change? Come on now. Really? This, surely, was the worst example of the lack of change we've been experiencing on this trip.

People just don't have change. Sometimes after visiting the ATM, we go into the bank to get smaller bills because we know no one will have change for the notes given out by the machine. Once in Cartagena I bought three things at three different checkouts in the same trip to the supermarket so I could break three useless $50,000 peso notes. So we've tried to adapt. Some of our adaptation is not so nice.

I lie. Shamelessly. Whereas at home I'd try to hand over a bill as close as possible to the cost of the item I'm purchasing, here I do the opposite. I offer the biggest bill I have. And when they ask me if I have anything smaller, I'll shake my head sadly. "No tengo." The reason I do that is because seventy-five percent of the time the person will sigh and pull out an entire bucket of change, or a wad of small bills.

Then again, sometimes there really is no change and I have to pull out something smaller. So I suspect them of lying and they suspect me of lying and it's all a vicious, vicious cycle. But sometimes neither of us are lying, and someone has to run across the street and get change from a neighbor while we wait.

But really, how can this busy chicken place not have $1.75 in change? Well, they claimed they didn't, and that they would get it to us. So we sat down to eat. Soup came first, a very nice chicken consomme which, as usual, was full of innards and feet. We ate the broth and left the other things. I've always thought I wanted to try chicken feet, but when I had that foot standing in my spoon, with its little toenails... I changed my mind. Then came the chicken itself, which was very nice.

After eating, we went back up to the counter. Our total had mounted since we'd laster decided to get a Coke and a melon juice. $4.70. The man showed us the total on his calculator. Now it was up to me. "Pagamos antes de comer," I said. The woman who'd taken our money was there and she tried to help. "No, no, no," she said, and proceeded to explain to us what we'd eaten and how it cost $4.70.

I didn't mind trying to explain to the man because he hadn't been there when we'd paid and been told there was no change. But the woman was the one who'd promised the change to us in the first place. And it's not as though we're a forgettable couple. So I have to say, I got a little "ugly American." I will explain why.

They were just staring at me, and the woman was explaining again that we'd eaten chicken and drunk Coke and therefore we owed money to the restaurant. My Spanish was not working. There were three things I was frustrated by. 1) Why isn't there ever any change? 2) Why doesn't this woman remember the gringo grande and the gringa negra? 3) Why can't I just say the sentence that I want to say?

I wanted, for once, to just say a sentence without struggling to find the words. I didn't even care about being understood anymore, I just wanted to say exactly what I wanted to say for once. So I said, in English, "WE GAVE YOU FIVE DOLLARS."

Then of course they really stared at me. I switched back to Spanish and miraculously this time the woman had a start of recognition and quickly explained to the man what had happened. He gave us our three dimes. Then he scolded the woman a little bit and I felt bad because I thought she wouldn't have gotten in trouble if I hadn't appeared so agitated.

After we left, I felt pretty stupid. Michael didn't help. For the whole rest of the afternoon he kept saying "WE GAVE YOU FIVE DOLLARS" at unexpected moments. But man, it is very frustrating not to be able to say some of the simplest things I want to say. The good news is we were on our way to enroll in Spanish school.

The bad news is the school was closed. Not surprisingly, since it's Saturday. But we had given it a shot since the schools in Antigua were all open on weekends just for flaky people like us who show up at the last minute and want to enroll. So I guess we'll have to try again early Monday morning and hope for the best.

After that we walked around looking for a cheaper hotel, but had no luck with that either. At the last place we tried, we climbed five floors to get to the room. Just outside the door was the shared bathroom, in which a man was peeing with the door open. I have to say, I'm getting pretty tired of seeing guys peeing everywhere we go. It's not the first time that I've encountered some guy peeing with the door open, not to mention peeing on the street, or peeing in a public restroom that was not built with privacy in mind.

The room was okay, but not as nice as the one we already had, and the peeing thing kind of soured me anyway. So we gave up the search for the day, and headed back to our room. On the way we passed an old woman selling cheese. "Cuanto cuesta?" Michael asked her.

"Un dollar," she said.

So Michael said he wanted one, and she dug a leaf-wrapped cube out from the bottom of the stack and prepared to put it into a plastic bag. It seemed larger than the ones he had pointed at and he asked about that. It turned out that the smaller ones were only fifty cents, so Michael said he wanted one of the fifty-cent cheeses. The woman seemed mad about it, but what could she do?

We also got some chaulafan to go from a restaurant across the street from our hotel. All we knew was that it was a kind of fried rice. You can't go wrong with fried rice, we thought. We also got two bottles of Coke, with the promise that we would return the bottles later or the next day.

The chaulafan was delicious. We had the "especial" and it was full of shrimp and chicken and beef, and had a fried egg on top. The Coke was nice and cold. The cheese, soft and white like cream cheese, was horrible. We think it may have gone bad, but we're not sure what it was supposed to taste like in the first place.

That's the thing about buying homemade cheese wrapped in a leaf from an old woman huddled in a doorway on the street. It might be terrible and it might be so delicious that you prowl the streets looking for her for the next week and buy all the large-size cheeses when you find her. Sadly, this time it was terrible. Good thing Michael figured out about the fifty-cent size.

But the chaulafan was good, and the chicken lunch was good, and hopefully we're going to take more Spanish lessons so we can express ourselves better. I need to learn how to say, "Would it be so terrible for you to close the door while you're peeing? I mean, for real."

 

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Sun peeks through the clouds, Cuenca.

Another view from Hostal Monastario, Cuenca.

Chaulafan especial, para llevar. (Good.)

Cheese wrapped in a leaf. (Bad.)

Some guy peeing, Cuenca.