So... What next?

27/01/2010

What if someone told you “Give me 5 bucks and you’ll eat more cupcakes than you can possibly manage!”? Would you not be all over that opportunity?

A good friend who knows how important cupcakes are to me, dropped me an email to inform me of a monthly event taking place this week, called “The Iron Cupcake Challenge”. The title itself was enough for me to open my eyes wide open.

Apparently, what the deal is, is that there is a cozy little tea shop, called Leland Tea, that organises a monthly cupcake face off. One can register as a baker and provide a batch of mini cupcakes to compete against others’ cupcakes. If you’re not a baker though, that's fine. You can be the consumer! You only need to pay 5 dollars and this way you register yourself as a “taster”. What does that mean? That means that you will sink your teeth in as many cupcakes as there are contestants.

This month’s specified ingredient was champagne. 17 bakers put their time and effort into creating a good batch of their cupcakes, for the tasters to eat and mark accordingly.




Do you see the number of cupcakes that are brought before me?!?!?!??!?!

That’s right. Each of us had 17 cupcakes during the half hour or so that we were supposed to consume them and mark them on the marking sheet. Some people could not handle 17, but I gave it my best shot.



I did well and I am very excited to have scoffed 17 cupcakes for the price of two (and a cup of tea on the side), but needless to say, my stomach was complaining for not taking care of it.
“Hush now, little thing. It was for a good cause. Look at the taste buds, look how happy they are!”

M.

24/01/2010

I have been taking it easy during these days in San Francisco. After 10 months on the road, I am feeling a bit tired and have been fully enjoying the luxury of having a room, a kitchen and a living room with 2 VERY comfortable couches.

I am pretty much lowering gear now and figuring out what I’ll be doing next. I’ve been in San Francisco for two weeks now and the times I actually left the house are easy to count. In fact, I have only gone out 3-4 times during the night. I’m turning into a couch potato. IT’S GREAT!!! :D

Today, we went with some friends for brunch to a place called “The Three Papayas".



It’s a pretty relaxed and interesting place, with a very underground feel to it. Funny thing was, as soon as we sat down, they brought us these little magazines.





I opened it and was flicking through it. It seemed to be a over-18s mexican comic book. I smiled at the fact that they had brought this for us to read, although it didn’t make much sense.

But then, I got to the last page and I noticed a little sticker on the inside of the back cover.



That was the menu!!! They literally stick their limited menu in between of the XXX phone numbers. You can't get more original than that!!

Just another typical brunch in San Francisco....

M.

25/07/2009

That is the title of the international cuisine festival that took place during one of the weekends in Bogota. (well, freely translated anyway...)

ALIMENTARTE





In all essence, the best and most renowned restaurants of the city gather up in a park and present their gastronomic creations, provided for especially "spicy" prices. It's a shame they don't charge something more approachable for the everyday people, but as usual (for better or for worse), the greedy man wins against the gluton...







Μ.

23/07/2009

So I finally made it to Bogota and one of the very first things I had arranged was to meet up with a local journalist. We met up and she took me for lunch to a restaurant called Andres carne de res. The place was so impressive, we ended up spending a large part of our meeting talking about the decoration of the restaurant.

Andres carne de res is not just a simple restaurant. It is a whole experience of visuals and flavors.







Μ.

18/06/2009

It's almost midnight and we are starving. We asked Santiago, our host, where to find something to east at this time and he suggested we walked by the river towards the center, where we'd definitely find something. In fact, he specifically mentioned a place called Mario Bross, which I had also noticed earlier, so we decided to go there. We took 13000 pesos with us (that's approximately 7 dollars), thinking that it should be more than enough. Besides, food in south america is quite cheap.

We walked for about a quarter of an hour and we arrived at the infamous Mario Bross.



We sat down, grabbed the menu, had a look... and our jaw dropped. A plain hot dog starts at three dollars!!! We couldn't believe it! We asked what the hell the other strange thing on the menu are and ended up ordering one each of something that supposedly has corn with cheese and bacon on top. That costs 6500 pesos (just over three bucks), so by ordering two plates we were spending all the money we had on us. The waiter asked what would we have to drink and we obviously asked for two glasses of tap water!

And our plate arrives... It's a shame I did not have my camera with me at the time to immortalise that creation. Guys, this little crappy plate appeared in front of me, which contained a few cord seeds, a bit of grated cheese and THREE small pieces of bacon!


We're talking kilometers wide.


As for its depth, I wouldn't know where to start!

I called for the waiter and after explaining to him that I am aware that he is not responsible for the prices and that I have nothing against him, I asked: "Can you please explain to me with what criteria do you guys charge this much for a tiny plate like this that comes with THREE tiny pieces of bacon?". And what did this very intelligent boy reply: "The meat is imported, it comes from Canada"!

Feeling my intelligence well underestimated and strongly believing that I alone had paid for the ticket of a canadian cow, I laughed, I ate my "meal" and left..........

M.

Today I would like to talk to you about... the granadilla.

No, it has nothing to do with the spanish city of Granada (or wherever else in the world happens to be a city/town/village/neighborhood/location/thing with the same name).
It also has nothing to do with grenadine, that red, liquid, chewing gum tasting thing that we used to put in our orange juice when we were kids to pretend we were drinking some sort of fancy cocktail.

What I am talking about, is a fruit! An exotic fruit, the existence of which I discovered while looking for cheap food near Machu Picchu.


I couldn't resist and I just opened it...

Its skin is orange, with white, little spots. Its outside is hard, but smooth and tender and can be easily broken, so please be gentle with it.

You can open it by slicing gently across the middle and tearing the two halves apart with your hands. You can now admire its beautiful content, a mass of black seeds, covered in a soft, transparent fleshy goodness.



Once you become more experienced, you should be able to tear it in half, while maintaining the entire content on just one half!



It is possible that for some it may not look very inspiring, but believe me, it's one the most delicious things you will ever try. Just sit back, relax, stick your tongue in that delightful ball of seeds and suck it in.



Keep it in your mouth while chewing it and let its sweet, fruity juices take over all your senses. Let yourself sink into the delight of this addiction.

Unfortunately, as all things, this too will come to an end.



But now without leaving you with a great smile on your face, giving away the satisfaction of the recently experienced pleasure! :)



Enjoy. If you happen to be in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela or Ecuador that is...

M.

13/6/2009

We finally succeeded leaving this place. Not that we didn't like it, but if I'm gonna start developing addictions already, I'm not gonna manage to see anything in the rest of the country.

The people, the food, the streets, the rum (damn rum...), the city... I fell in love with all that! And C. and E., our couchsurfing hosts, treated us so well, it was really difficult to leave.


The street market.


A local specialty. Tamal de Pipian!


The garden at C.'s place.


The two bridges of the city...


And the same bridges at Patojo village, the miniature Popayan. (Let's see, who reads my blog regularly? :p )

We spent a day at Coconuco and some thermal baths nearby.





It's really funny how they distinguish the baths depending on the water temperature: boiling water and warm water (agua hirviendo and agua tibia respectively).



That day we spent the least possible. Hitch hiked there and back (yes, it is possible to hitch hike in Colombia. Get over it!) y with a bit of persuasion, we got in the thermal baths for free. Ok, the fact that we spent quite a lot later on that night on beer and rum is another story. :)

The following day we spent it at a village called Silvia. A small, traditional, quiet village, where men and women dress up in traditional, colourful dresses.







The crazy fact of the day? Our lunch. Bandeja Paisa its name and its size ridiculous! They had told us to go there hungry and they were right!



And after these adventures, the wonderful food and the heavy drinking, we packed our things and headed to Cali...

Μ.

Once again an early morning wake-up and off we go to form waves on lake Titicaca. 20-odd people on the boat, along with our guide Juan Carlos, we set off towards the islands of the lake.

The surface of the water within the port area has a strong green color, which although looks interesting when the boat tears through it and leaves a blue track behind it, it still is not very inspiring to touch at all.





Within a couple of hours we had made our two first stops at two of the Uros islands. These are floating islands, artificially made out of dirt from the bottom of the lake and bamboo, onto which live native Quechua families. Personally... not impressed. To me all it seemed like was a tourist trap which although possibly once genuine and fascinating, now it is just being taken advantage by the big boys of local tourism and it seems completely fake. I couldn't stop getting the feeling that to those families (which I doubt they were actually native and having lived all their lives on those villages) saw us like walking dollars. They didn't care about our interest to see their life, the same way that most tourist don't really care about their life. All they go there for is to take a photo of the brave native man that lives in the middle of the lake and the cute little girl and rolls on the bamboo sticks and licks the crap of them. I just wanted to get out of there...





We sailed a few more hours and reached Amantani, one of the biggest villages of the lake and where we would spend the night. Here's another tourist trap. Local women took us all and offered us a room to sleep in and also a plate of food for dinner and breakfast. Later on in the night they even put up a show for us. Dressed us up in local costumes and we all gathered in their community centre (equiped with a mini-market of course) to dance their local dances. Yes, let's take the tourists and show them what our life is like. Please... As if this is how they live. You could see it on their faces that they were not awfully excited to have us there and they were certainly not in the mood to be jumping around and dancing with a bunch of people that don't even know why they are doing what they're doing. This is what the travel agent put on our plates and we are simply eating it. Oh, how original. I bet no one has ever done this before...........
Touristy part aside, this is a very interesting island. Peace and quiet all around, old people working hard, magnificent views of the lake, both from the shore as well as from high up at the Pachatata and Pachamama temples and no electricity! Too bad we're experiencing it through the tourist funfare...





The following morning we set off early to go to one more island before setting course back to Puno. Taquile was the name of it and once again,everyone waiting for the "wealthy" tourists to charge them two dollars for a snickers bar. Nothing impressive about it, especially as my earlier fears have by now been confirmed. Other than the fact that this lake is gigantic and is reaching the clouds, it has nothing more to show me compared to the greek islands that I've visited in the past.



So, having followed the most touristy path ever, we're back in Puno and planning to leave towards Cusco tomorrow. But nooooooo.... We'll just stick around another day, doing nothing, because I got food poisoning by the delicious meal that family is Amantani offered us. Lovely...

Yes. Lake Titicaca. Been there, done that, don't want a friggin t-shirt, stop trying to sell it to me!!!

M.

By the time we arrived in Puno until the following morning that we'd start the tour, we had a good few hours to spend and we spent it very wisely; we slept and we ate very well! :)

Apart from the hotel in which I bargained one hell of a price, we discovered two gems of the culinary category. First it was Sayary, a small, local-looking restaurant, outside the whole touristy hype with great prices, relaxed atmosphere, great food and HUGE portions!



That was only the beginning though, because while looking for a good dosage of chocolate we found... COLORS (dramatic music here please)!! This was not Puno. This was not Peru. It was an oasis in the middle of the desert. It was a fluffy couch in the middle of a construction site. We could not believe this place.

To start with, it was classy. It wasn't run down and it wasn't cheesy. Design chairs and sofas, nicely decorated lighting, a semi-transparent staircase... And what started off as a joke, became reality. It had wireless internet! It was a place to relax for hours.



And then the menu comes. What it this?? What do you mean you provide a lamb dish with tzatziki?? Why am I seeing the word "saganaki" in a restaurant's menu in Peru? What are all these thai curry based creations?? Marquise de chocolate for desert???? My pills!!! Of course I asked the waitress about all this and it all made sense. The chef is Greek. A lady who left Greece at some point and moved here and apparently built the menu of this restaurant! Incredible! I really wanted to have a chat with her, but unfortunately she was in Lima at the time...

Oh well. I'll just... You know... Sit back and have another marquise de chocolate with my cappuccino! I'm just stocking up before tomorrow's tour, that's all!



M.