No Pachamanca for you.

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude this morning, which was the kind of book that finishing left me feeling kind of dazed, but I tried my best to give the day some direction

Today Melissa and I ventured to the park in Santa Eulalia, where there was a festival of Pachamanca and free plates for 2,000 people. It was absolute madness. I'm still unclear on exactly what defines a food as Pachamanca, but it involves cooking things (potato, sweet potato, meat, tamale) in a hole in the ground. I wasn't even hungry initially, but I certainly was after an hour of waiting in line and seeing deliciously large portions pass by. There were five people before the line ended and they ran out. Melissa and I consoled ourselves with some picarones (fried donut-type desserts doused in anise honey) and then found every Peace Corps Volunteer in the madness and mooched some of their food. It was almost worth standing in line with people who have a vastly different idea of personal space than we do and having ''COLA! COLA!'' shouted at us every time it appeared we veered away from the line by half an inch or so.

This week has been filled with entertaining ''cultural exchanges'' with my family.

Exchange 1 (with my host sister, who has a 5-year-old daughter):
Angela: ''Do you know the movie Shrek? What does 'Shrek' mean in Spanish?''
Me: ''Oh, nothing, it's just the ogre's name.''
Angela: ''No, it sounds exactly like another English word you taught us.''
Me: ''Um, 'shriek' is a shout?''
Angela: ''No, no. Something the kids say on Halloween. A travesura.''
Me: ''Oh. TRICK.''

To be fair, in a Spanish accent, those words do sound exactly the same. And I was pleased that my lecture on the customs of Halloween stuck with them.

Exchange 2 (with my host dad, a history teacher):
Me: English speakers have trouble learning to say dates in Spanish. Because in English, we don't say one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, we say nineteen ninety-seven.''
Everd (laughing uproariously): Haha, English speakers, you have to separate it because you don't like to count to two thousand.

This honestly seemed like as reasonable an explanation for why we separate our numbers as any.

Exchange 3 (with Melissa's 13-year-old brother, watching professional wrestling)
Julio Cesar: ESMACKDOWN is on! What does ESMACKDOWN mean in Spanish?


Yesterday was also another successful day at the Agrarian Institute, with transplanting broccoli, learning about living fences, techniques for breaking up hard soil without water, etc. If getting up on Saturdays weren't so hard, those would easily be some of the best educational days of my life.