Friday, March 17, 2006

We spent yesterday resting up from our overnight bus trip, meaning we sat around watching TV and peoplewatching from our window, periodically threatening to take a nap but never doing it. We finally got hungry and left the room looking for food.

Medellin's centro is a happening spot. Directly behind our hotel there is a narrow pedestrian mall lined with restaurants, shops, bakeries, and ice cream spots. Sidewalk vendors spread out displays of bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies and beastiality porn. Tinto vendors push around cups and thermoses in carts made of plastic crates wired to old baby buggies. Guys in orange t-shirts sell cell phone time for 300 Colombian pesos per minute. There are flower stands everywhere.

After wandering about in this for a while, we settled on a restaurant. A table on the balcony overlooking the busy street was a perfect spot for more peoplewatching. We really love just watching people walk around doing their thing.

I had been wanting to try the local specialty, bandeja, which is rice, beans, chorizo, beef, chicharron, egg, avocado, and plantain. I didn't know it was all mixed together or what, but it's all stuff I like. But then on the menu I saw mondongo, which I've been seeing everywhere. So Michael and I decided that we would order one of each.

Well, the bandeja was good (no, it was not all mixed together), but the mondongo... we didn't like it. It was a bowl of yellow stew accompanied a small plate containing a scoop of rice, half an avocado, and a peeled banana. The smell was odd, and the pieces of whatever floating in it had a texture that was like fat, but yet not. I like fat. That delicious crispy fat layer around the edge of a steak or pork chop? My favorite part.

So if it had been just fat, I probably would have liked it, but it wasn't, it was weird and bad and I had to spit it out, which is something I almost never do no matter how much I hate it what I'm eating. I tried to eat some of the soupy stuff around the gross bits, mixing it with rice, but in the end just gave up.

Michael gave the mondongo a better try than I did, eating several spoonfuls in a row and not spitting anything out, but he gave up too and we both just ate the bandeja, which was good. The beans were huge. All the beans we've had in Colombia have been huge.

Beans have been a constant since Mexico and it's really been interesting to watch the bean style change from country to country. Refried brown and then refried black in Mexico, whole black in El Salvador, whole red in Costa Rica, and now giant red in Colombia.

My jugo de maracuya (passionfruit juice) was excellent. I had the waitress wrap up the mondongo to go. There are a lot of particularly forlorn looking beggars in the area, and I figured I could foist it off on one of them.

So after dinner we went for a walk around. We eventually gave the mondongo to a woman sitting on the sidewalk panhandling with her kid. We warned her that it was mondongo, but she smiled and took it and seemed happy, so that's good.

Back in our room, we looked out the window to see a couple of guys tearing through the garbage bags on the corner and eating whatever food they found. They did not seem to be fussy, just grabbed and stuffed food into their mouths without examining it or brushing it off. I've never seen anything like it before and watched for a long time, feeling terrible. The mondongo was just one little serving, but I was glad I had given it to someone instead of just wasting it.

Tonight our desire to try new things was temporarily dampened, so we went out for "broasted" chicken. I don't know what broasted is, whether it's Spanish, or mistranslated English, or some made up thing, but it's everywhere and seems to be what we know as rotisserie. Sometimes they call it "brosty" chicken. Whatever, it's your standard chicken, no surprises. Except for the plastic glove that came with each of our plates, to keep our hands clean, I suppose. We're from the land of "finger lickin' good," so we didn't wear ours.

The manager of the place, whom we had initially disliked because of the pompous (we thought) way he'd intoned, "You will be served inside" when we stopped to look at the menu board, took our money at the cash register.

"Where are you from?" he asked Michael.

"Los Estados Unidos, Nueva York," Michael said.

It turned out the guy had lived in England for three years. He said he was going back there in two months, but that he loved his country. We said Colombia was great, and he got very serious. He put his hand over his heart and said, "If you say you love my country, I will be so happy." Well, you'd have to be a real jerk not to say you loved Colombia after that. And we do think it's great. We've been having a really good time here, which we assured him. We didn't mention the mondongo.

He was pleased, and even seemed like he might cry. We talked a bit about the perception of Colombia as a dangerous place and Michael said that one needs to be careful just as in New York, but we feel fine walking around. "Yes, I feel very safe here," the man said. He was so happy, and assured us again that he loved Colombia, that he was going to England, but he wouldn't be here now if he didn't love it here.

Afterwards we tipped our waitress and she seemed surprised and delighted. We read that we should tip 10% in nicer restaurants; I guess brosty chicken spots are not nice. But really those are the best kind of tips. I still remember the guy who tipped me $5 when I was working as a hostess at Lyons on Thanksgiving. I never got tips, and that was more than my hourly salary after taxes and "meal plan." He made my week.

So it turns out we may be staying next door to a brothel. We can't be sure, because we can't see inside the place. The doorway leads into a long tiled tunnel that turns to the right before opening into whatever the business is. We saw one of the ladies who works there, heavily made up and in a teeny-tiny skirt. She was buying something in the same tienda where we were buying bottled water. The men leered at her like we have never seen before. We've seen men look at the young girls in the tight clothes and it's not exactly discreet, but they went Warner Brothers google-eyed at this lady.

Maybe it's just some kind of go-go bar, who knows. There's no crush of chattering, laughing drunken partiers that collect outside of regular bars. And we've never seen anyone go inside. There's just one guy who stands outside and claps for attention. A lot of vendors here do it, they *clap, clap, clap, clap, clap* and then call out "I have underwear and belts for sale," or whatever. This guy only claps. We can hear him from our room. *clap, clap, clap, clap, clap* ....pause... *clap, clap, clap, clap, clap* It goes on late into the night.

 

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Corner of Parque Bolivar. Hotel Plaza is behind the hanging roots of the tree.

Buying/selling cell phone minutes.

Tinto transaction, Medellin.

Going through the trash. View from Hotel Plaza, Medellin.

Nighttime view from the Hotel Plaza, Medellin.