Bicycles & Food

Biking:
We’ve had many opportunities to mountain bike in the month we’ve been here. Cris has been out a few times, and I’ve been riding about 10 times since we arrived a month ago and put a good coating of mud on the xtracycle. So far, we’ve ridden with: our doorman, Santos; Cris’s colleague from IGA (http://www.igaxela.org) , Hector; the owner of a local bookshop, Colin; and a group of guys from 2 different local bike shops.

The terrain here is quite different from mountain biking in CA or WA, where rolling hills are most prevalent and you’re constantly switching from climbing to descending. Here, if you go on a 2-hour ride, you spend the first hour and 45 minutes climbing up one side of a mountain and the remaining 15 minutes descending the other face. I’ve only seen one descent where I had to think about what I was doing so I didn’t crash. Otherwise, the biking is not technical as most trails are built for daily transportation rather than for extreme sports entertainment.





Food highlights:

Tortillas:
The tortillas are excellent, thick, and very filling. And there is a shop on almost every city block where you can buy tortillas hot off the fire. But best of all is watching 2 or 3 women “tortilleando” at the same time. They get a ball of corn dough, flatten it out, and then they slap it back and forth from palm to palm – all three women in near unison – slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. Making tortillas makes a sound that took me only a few instances to recognize without looking, and now I already feel nostalgic for that sound because I know I won’t be hearing it for much longer. The bad news is that I’ll never be able to eat another tortilla from a supermarket in the US – or maybe that’s the good news.

Batidos & licuados:
It seems Latin America was the birthplace of the smoothie, which they call batidos and licuados. They’re usually simple with relatively few ingredients, usually just one fruit blended with milk, but the selection is broad. Papaya, watermelon, cantaloupe, banana, mango, strawberry, and more.

Food lowlights:
After a month in Xela, the food situation is improving. During the first week, we mostly ate at restaurants, which is hit and miss in any new city. Weeks 2 and 3 were pretty rough because I started cooking, or rather, trying to cook, but I was constantly missing key ingredients for many dishes that I often make. I couldn’t get sushi rice, Japanese ingredients, Chinese ingredients, Middle-Eastern ingredients, Mexican ingredients, Thai ingredients, Kalamata olives, good baguettes, etc. There just aren’t enough immigrants here! All the foreigners are gringos and they open restaurants rather than markets.

By week two, I was getting desperate. I noticed a Chinese guy selling pastries on the street in front of a store. Here was my chance: I closed in on him and started with 20 questions about where to find Asian food. After about a minute of peppering him with food complaints and questions, he got a glazed look and I realized that his Spanish was marginal to non-existent as he tried to reply with one-word answers. Sorry I asked. Never mind.

There’s no phone book for Xela, so you can’t just flip it open to “Grocers” and find out where the groovy grocery stores are. We’re learning that in order to get what you want, you have to know the right people who have gone through the same hassles that you’re going through now.

For example, at the main farmer’s market, you can find garbanzo beans, lemons, garlic, olive oil, and now you just need tahini so you can make hummus. Good luck finding tahini, right? Well, one day, while I was talking to a cook at a restaurant, I mentioned that tahini was impossible to find and he offered to special order me a bottle of tahini from Guatemala City. I’m supposed to pick it up tomorrow.

A colleague of Cris’s from IGA, Scott, told us where to get sushi rice, soba noodles, miso paste, wakame, and many other Japanese products. You should have seen me. I looked like I was preparing for Armageddon because I bought so much food. This market, incidentally, was about a block from “Almacen Zhang” that I mentioned above, but you’d never know it was an Asian market judging by the front of the shop. Maybe I’ll stop by Zhang’s place and let him know.

I only found Mexican mole sauce by chance when I stopped at a place that was selling unrelated foods. The mole was sold in plastic bags tied with rubber bands. They looked like little bricks of opium. We also went to a café and had a coffee and pastry, and as we turned around, there on a shelf were 6 or 7 Chinese food products. A café is not the first place I think of when I need to get oyster sauce and black bean paste, but now I know. “Yes, I’d like the raspberry and mango tart, and a bottle of super-hot sesame oil.”

Another time, I was across the street buying eggs and tortillas and (again) complaining that I hadn’t been able to find fresh fish. The 3 women who run the shop invited me to go shopping with them the following Friday where you can find the best fish in town at…get this…THE MAIN BUS STATION, OF COURSE! Why didn’t I think of that?

So, one-stop shopping is out of the question. Four or five stops seems pretty reasonable.