Shopping for Food

(The photo worked! This is where our site in on the big map of El Salvador. You can see our names at the top, near Honduras) This entry is being made at the same time as at least one other, so scroll down and read the other one first. Today we went shopping for veggies. Those of you that have traveled a bit can probably imagine the usual third world type market, full of strange looking foods and smells, with meat that makes you sure you should be a vegetarian. Well, this isn’t one of those stories. Sure, those exist here, lots, but they are in the pueblos and the bigger towns. Out where we are, there are little tiendas (stores) or tienditas, and these carry things like soap, chips, cookies, soup bullion, chips, candy, oh, and did I mention chips (which are called churros here). The point is, they don’t carry any veggies. So, when you need veggies up here (Quick digression,; I’m going to say up here meaning that our site is pretty much uphill from everywhere in the country. The nearest town is an hour and a half and 3,000 plus foot elevation drop by bus… so it really does feel like “up here”), anyway veggies up here you get by going to the source.

So, today we walked down towards the river, which is the same as saying that we walked towards Honduras, and we met up with a guy who is growing broccoli and cauliflower. After quite a bit of polite conversation we ended up buying two nice heads of each, as fresh as is possible via a machete cut. Afterwards we talked some more to a family next door, and were offered some refresco de limon (lemonade… kind of), at this point when we are offered this stuff, we are going to drink it… it is too hard to politely decline. We’ll see if we end up getting sick, then we’ll have to change our habits, so far things are fine. I really do think that the water people use here is pretty safe. After some more good conversation and having to explain why we are here, we moved uphill carrying our load of broccoli and cauliflower. We passed by a tomatera (tomato field) and talked to a guy who was harvesting a bunch to take down to San Salvador, of course we then got a bunch of tomatoes added to our load.

In the end, we made a very nice fresh soup for lunch today that included the stuff we got today, plus some cabbage and guisquil (squash -like thing) we picked up yesterday, rice pasta and egg. After ten weeks of having very little control over our diet, we are really enjoying being able to cook our own food. It is interesting how much time that shopping and cooking can take out of your day here… luckily the interactions with our neighbors counts towards our “work”.

Oh, and I just added a photo, and it actually worked! So, in the future expect more photos appearing in this currently rather drab site!