Roundtrip back to Sa Pa

      Something weird is going on with the format.  I think this is what I want to post, but please pretend that the water buffalo is at the end instead of after the sugarcane paragraph.
     Our trekking guide was a Black Hmong girl named Zaa.  She learned English by speaking to tourists but was very fluent, and very helpful in answering all our questions about houses, marriage, food, and clothes.  For a couple of hours we hiked through cloud and couldn't see much more than the road and a few feet beyond but by the time we rounded the mountain and came near our destination, Ta Phin, the clouds were being burned away.  Apparently we were lucky in the weather because often it doesn't clear up at all this time of year.  We had views of rice paddies and mountains and trees, and lots and lots of pigs.  
      In the Hmong culture New Year's is the traditional time to meet your future husband/wife.  It's the only time of the year where nobody has to work.  They make new clothes for the holiday and dress up to go the markets and chat and mingle. As I understand it, a boy can give a girl a gift and if she accepts it then a few days later he and his friends will kidnap, 'xij', her and take her to his family where they will get married soon after.  Traditionally she can only refuse the marriage if no gift was offered or if she didn't accept it but I think that's changing.  Many weddings take place a couple of weeks after the holiday.
      Zaa told us that she and her husband met in church, which is very unusual.  Her family is Catholic and her husband's Christian.  She's nineteen and been married a year, and wanted to know when I was getting married and if I would be allowed to choose my own husband.
     Overnight we homestayed in the house of a Red Dao (pronounces 'zow') family.  We had sandwiches on the veranda for lunch before walking around the town.  The house had two large rooms inside, a loft, two rooms outside for guests, and a porch with table and chairs.  Inside one room was lined with wooden beds and the other was a kitchen.  The mother and father lived in the house, and their son lived with them, and while we were there their daughter and her son came to visit.  They seemed like a close family, and were very friendly helpful even though they spoke no English.

The house we stayed the night in

     In Ta Phin there are the Black Hmong and the Red Dao tribes as well as some Vietnamese.  We walked the length of the village and stopped on the way back to buy a stalk of sugarcane.  It looks a little like a large piece of bamboo but the woman selling it took of the outside with a machete and cut it up into smaller pieces, and on the inside it was pale and fibrous.  We bit off pieces and chewed on them until the juice was gone, then spat out the leftovers on the side of the road.  The juice was sweet but not cloying, and really thirst-quenching but after a piece and a half I'd had enough.  
     Before we ate we played cards with Zaa for a while, modifying 'spoons' to 'chopsticks'.
     For dinner the hotel which we planned the trip from sent a cook because we were vegetarian and we were treated to a feast.  We put a huge dent into the tofu, spring rolls, carrots, cabbage salad, cooked Chinese cabbage, and fake prawns but were ultimately unable to finish them. 
     It got dark early and we went to bed soon after, but due to the pigs, two-month-old baby, cat-which-sounded-like-the-two-month-old-baby, and roosters our sleep was a little interrupted.  
      For breakfast we were adeptly made pancakes over the fire.
      It was misty and cold and damp when we set out but, after a brief round of pouring rain which vanished as soon as the ponchos appeared, cleared up nicely.  It wasn't as muddy today as yesterday until we got to the paths through the rice paddies but our shoes stayed cleaner overall.  
    When we reached Sa Pa we were amazed at the size of the town.  We had driven through it on our way from the train station, but who knew there was a lake?   The low cloud had effectively hidden everything more then ten feet away from us.  We walked through the market again and were barraged.  
      Instead of eating on the way we waited until we went back to our hotel and had warm noodles for lunch before saying goodbye to Zaa.  

Market Mayhem

     They say, 'Make me happy'.  They say, 'You buy from her, now will you buy from me?'  They say, 'I worked so hard.  You don't like it?'  They grab your hand and make you pinky-promise to be their friend for the afternoon.
     Entering the market, we were swarmed.
     Sa Pa is a touristy town but we were among the first to wander into the stalls and were set upon by a half dozen women, three sticking with us while we walked through the market and the other three not the same but rotating as we moved on.  They talked to my parents.  She asked, 'Where are you from?', 'What is your name?', 'How old is your daughter?'.  Very friendly.  After a couple minutes she changed to taking pillow covers and wallets from a plastic shopping bag.  This was a cue for more women to walk over and start arguing about whose prices were lower.  Everybody is smiling, friendly, but in your face.  We just want breakfast and tell them that we might buy later but this was such a mistake.  They become even more eager to sell things to us now because later maybe there will be too many people to find us, later maybe we will forget.  It's hard to say 'no' when they seem so nice.  I might like to look at something but I can't ask because then they want to sell it, and they tell me that if I don't want to buy it they have wasted so much time making it because it must be ugly.
     The only one of us who has dealt with markets like this, my dad, steps in and says no firmly to everyone.  This deters all but two or three who talk to us until we make our way to the food section and sit at a table.  They have delicious veggie soup here (since I didn't take any soup pictures in Hanoi this is the model for my last entry), with lots of noodles, fresh mint, the kind of chili sauce that is spicy but not really salty, tofu, mushrooms (that's what kind of looks like meat), and a clear vegetable broth.  I made a point of not looking at the kitchen where they prepare the food.

The food court

     When we sat down we thought we evaded our retinue but about halfway through breakfast I looked over towards the center of the food court and noticed the first woman who spoke to us watching me.  She must have left partway through eating because we didn't see her again until we were almost to the safety of our hotel.   I saw her a few feet away as we left the market and thought maybe she didn't see us, but she started walking in our direction.  There was a rather large group of people between us and her but she drifted determinedly at an angle to intersect.  Luckily she starts the banter up from the beginning again and we made it to the hotel before she started guilt-tripping us.
     It was still early after breakfast because our train arrived three hours before we expected.  My parents had some warning but I had about a minute between 'Wake up, Anna!' and standing on the platform in which to wake up, stuff my pillow and book in my daypack, put on shoes and coat, and negotiate my way off the upper bunk.  There are three Cat-Cat hotels in Sa Pa but a car from ours met us at the station.  From Lao Cai where we were left to Sa Pa was a little less than an hour in the car, on narrow, twisty road hugging the mountain.  Originally we planned to leave the day after we arrived to hike for three days and then motorbike back on the third but revised the plan once seeing the lack of barrier between road and drop-off.  Instead we hiked for two days and walked a loop, Sa Pa to the village where we homestayed the night, through a couple of other villages, and back to Sa Pa.
     

Dinner in the City

     In Hanoi it's good to wait for the light to change because then most of the cars and maybe one or two of the motorcycles will stop.  You have to pick a path and keep moving on it because the motorcycles calculate their trajectory based on where you should be and will drive a foot ahead of you and a foot behind without slowing down.  Often it's best to wait until a group of people cross and cross with them.
     The first street I crossed was a little side street that relatively wasn't that busy.  It felt crazy.  Everbody had their headlights on and were honking their horns constantly, every few steps a new motorcycle would be immediately ahead of and behind me, people shouted, people talked, smoke and pollution and meat and soup and chilis scented and fogged the air.  Even when I was in the few feet before the sidewalk there were dangers to avoid--slowly cooling but still red-hot cooking stones and a scooter going the wrong way on the one-way street. Once off the street I dodged stoves, chairs, potted flowers, mannequins, cats, people, and lines of parked motorbikes.  Some of the food sellers have nooks off the street that the can put tables in but most find a good corner or stretch of block.  Pick two reasonably compatible chopsticks, add some mint and chili, and lean out of the way of passing pedestrians!

Around Hanoi

     This morning we walked a loop that must covered half the city.  First around the lake, then past the army museum and flag tower, to the mausoleum, to the botanical gardens, West Lake and the pagoda there, around the Truc Bach Lake, toward the market, to lunch, and then home.
     The place to see Ho Chi Minh closes at 11 and we were a little worried that we wouldn't make it but had time to spare.  From the outside it was a squareish stone building with steps covered in red sticky mats leading up to it, with white-uniformed guards standing outside.  Apparently Ho Chi Minh wanted to be cremated in the traditional Vietnamese fashion but against his wishes was embalmed after his death and is now in this stone building.  The casket was glass-topped wood, carved beautifully, in the center of a medium room with a walkway around three sides filled with a slow-moving procession of people.  
     From here we went past the French presidential palace, to the garage where Ho Chi Minh kept his cars and the stilt house where he supposedly lived at the end of his life.  The house and furniture was made out of a dark wood.  On the ground was a table and chairs then in the house part of the house there were two rooms that we could see into, one a study and the other a bedroom.  Both were pretty spartan.  The bed didn't even have a mattress, only a woven mat.
     At the botanical gardens we stopped in the cafe for coconuts.
     At West Lake  there were restaurant boats that looked ready to sink but apparently were still doing business as well as a pagoda that claims to be the oldest temple.  It was crowded on the bridge to the temple and at the temple.  There was a demonstration here, and we caught the end of a dance, a song, and a second dance.
      Things are still closed for the holidays and the market was shuttered up, but it was fun walking through the non-touristy parts of Hanoi to get there.  For lunch we planned to walk most of the way home from the market to there area of a lot of food stalls that we ate at our first night here but stopped earlier at a restaurant that advertised selling vegetarian food.  I think this was wise, because it meant that I got some protein (tofu) rather than the dubiously healthy meat substitutes at a stand.
     This evening we played a round of hearts again for the first time in a while.  I lost.  
     The water puppet theater was sold out today but we got tickets for tomorrow and walked to the Quán An Ngon restaurant.  There were few veggie options so we moved on to a well-reviewed place called the Hanoi Social Club.  Food was good an the atmosphere Olympia-ish but I think it was only well-reviewed because the menu was in English and the food was western.

I Blame Jetlag

     I don't know if anyone looks at the paragraph at the top of the blog where it says how much time we've spent in the process of moving from place to place, but I am a little surprised that, if we continue at this rate, if there were teleporters then we could have cut more than a month of our trip.  I'm not saying I want to cut a month of the trip, but at least an entire 1/6 of this was spent getting from point A to point B and that's a lot of time.
     The Buenos Aires airport system didn't make sense until we realized that they don't make you lose your liquids above 3 ounces until the second security because you only have to do that when you go to the US.  After security #1 we went to another long line where they stamped our passports and took our thumbprints and photographs and then were funnelled through the perfumed duty-free shop to reach our gate.  Before we could board the plane there was the second security and here we had to empty our water bottle a second time, having done it preemptively before.  For whatever reason United never gets that we want vegetarian meals but come dinner they managed to rustle up a couple of salad plates.  I was so excited that people were speaking English to us again.
     We had a very short layover in Houston but had plenty of time to go through customs.  From Houston to San Francisco it was about 4 hours but on top of the 10-hour one we had just had it felt like forever.  After collecting our bags we took the BART shuttle to near our hotel and a cab the rest of the way.  Our stopover in San Francisco was two nights and so much of it was running around shipping things and running errands and, for me, a little much-needed peer interaction that it just flew by.
     On Friday there was some momentary celebration as our flight was delayed and I thought I might have a few more hours with my friend but it turned out that it just meant we had to sit at the airport for longer in case it got un-delayed.  Two hours after we were supposed to leave and still not boarding, but by three hours we were in the air.  Finally they remembered the vegetarian food!  Since we left at 5.00 San Francisco time and arrived at 11.00 the next evening (with a plus-16-hours upon reaching Hong Kong) we got two dinners.
     Customs was a breeze--all we had to do was walk through the green door labelled 'nothing to declare'.  It took some time to get our luggage and take it to the airport hotel, but because it was the airport hotel we could walk to it along a causeway.  Despite it being an airport hotel and probably because it was Hong Kong it was fancy.  Somehow we managed to get a few hour's solid sleep so left our bags at the front desk and took the Hong Kong airport equivalent of BART to Kowloon.  There was a vegetarian restaurant we found on the eighth floor of some building but it was closed for another 40 minutes after we arrived so we walked to the promenade and the bay.  It was packed with people on the boardwalk because of New Year but we pushsed out way through and eventually came upon this 1881 heritage site.
      The heritage site was dominated by two giant blond bear statues wearing purple robes that people took pictures with.  Along the sides of the square there were smaller statues of the bears wearing less regal clothes, one standing by a piano, others posing in other ways.
      When we made it back to the restaurant it was packed in a way I've never seen a veggie-only restaurant packed before.  The food was unsurprisingly the best Chinese food I've eaten.  Barring a small altercation with a pair of chopsticks and a small piece of pineapple the meal went smoothly and afterwards we took the ferry across the bay to Hong Kong.
     The streets were packed with people.  Crossing the road is an ordeal because most of the sidewalk has a fence on it and crosswalks are sparse so it's nice when there is an underground walkway.  The first walkway we went on was lined with women on each side.  Groups ate lunch or napped on large squares of cardboard or picnic blankets.  They didn't seem to be homeless but we have no idea who they were.
     After the street crossing we came across an evangelical demonstration.  There were rows of folding seats in the middle of a blocked-off road, dancers dressed in pink-and-white silk, western music, and a speaker who spoke in English and Chinese (Mandarin?).
     In the middle of the city there was a park.  We spent some time walking around the aviary and afterwards walked through the rest of it looking for an exit.  Finally we found one and made our way to the Ladies' Market but found it too overwhelming and packed to go into.  The goldfish market wasn't where it was supposed to be on the map and the flower market was closed so we took a taxi to the shuttle station and went back to the airport.
     Our flight to Hanoi was only 30 minutes late and we arrived 2 hours later.  Back in Olympia we got our visas for Vietnam but apparently they weren't right and we spent about an hour waiting to get new ones.  When we had finally made it through customs we were relieved to find that the car the hotel had sent was still waiting for us and we crashed as soon as we arrived.
      Many of the shops and restaurants in Hanoi emptied out for the holidays so we ate street food and probiotics the first day.  I only went out in the evening and by then the lake was lit up by green lights, the silk lanterns on the streets by blue and red and yellow and orange lights, and the big pink flowers on some streets and yellow stars on others show up.  The street booths are still open and bustling and people dressed up for Tet pose for pictures.
     My Vietnamese is limited to two badly-pronounced phrases--cảm ơn (thank you) and ăn chay (vegetarian)--but we managed to avoid the meaty pho and have a kind of cheesy sweet dipping sauce with noodle clumps.  
     Breakfast comes with the hotel and is a great time for me to practice with chopsticks without being observed.  They work most of the time for me but I'm still operating on the principle that as long as it gets from the plate to your mouth it isn't bad manners.  
     For a few hours before lunch we go on a walking tour of the city.  I'd like to learn more about the Vietnamese buddhism because it seems almost like there is an element of ancestor worship in some of the temples.  We visit two, one 1500 years old and the other from the 11th century.  The offerings in both were paper money or stacks of food, and were brimming with incense and worshippers.
      Between temples we tour a tube-house.  For centuries people were taxed based on how much space on the street they take up so houses were built long, tall, and narrow.  The one we visit has two floors and four rooms in a line away from the street on the downstairs floor.  There are courtyards inside, places where there is no roof and plants grow, and paintings on the walls. 
      After the tube house we visited the Hao Lo prison but were too disturbed to go through all of it.  
     Hopefully most restaurants will be open tomorrow but today we ate at an Indian restaurant.  It was a good protein boost in a place where most of the protein comes from the chicken watching you eat your soup.
     

Hong Kong street signs

Tet decorations

Pagoda (Hanoi)

Hong Kong skyline over Hong Kong park

Aviary bird

Hanoi

Hong Kong/Kowloon ferry

Bridge over Hoan Kiem lake

     This isn't a real blog post, but I wanted to clear up any confusion there may be about when we're going to Hong Kong.  Since we have a phone and are back in the US, we spoke to a couple of my relatives and I think I wasn't clear that we are not leaving at 8.00 tonight but on the 8(th), so, Friday.  Olympians, if I hitchiked my way home could I stay with any of you?

Recap

      Halfway through the trip is a good time for a recap... of all the food we ate.  It ranged from inedible to delicious but a lot was dead smack in the middle.  To the best of my memory, I'm going to write about the worst and best thing from each city.  This will take a while.

Lima:

     Best food:  The small cafe in the Barranco barrio that we walked to along the water.  From the street it looked almost like the entrance to the courtyard of a house, but when you walked through there was the counter and a bunch of tables outside.  There was frozen lemonade that I still dream about, an almost-solid-chocolate brownie, and a milkshake made out of lucuma (eggfruit, I think).  The lemonade was a little like a slushie, and really tart and flavorful; the brownie was a chocolate injection; the milkshake tasted a little like cherries and was better than the actual fruit, which has bizarre texture.

    Worst food:  Chinatown.  We were walking around the Centro for a few hours, were hot, tired, thirsty, and had heard about the brilliant Chinese food.  Eventually we made our way over there, found a restaurant, waited in line for a while, and when we got in it was wet, slimy, and tasteless.

Ollantaytambo:
     Best food:  The small restaurant Puka Rumi, at the far end of town.  There was a huge stone pizza oven, and they had the best cream of mushroom soup and guacamole.

     Worst food:  When we past through again, after the Lares trek and on the way to Macho Picchu, we got ice cream on our way to the train station.  I was creative, and tried a new flavor called 'Crema de Cielo'.  I assume that that doesn't translate literally but the closest I could think of as a translation was 'Cotton Candy', the really sickly sweet kind that's blue.  As the worst food goes, this wasn't so bad.

Cusco:
     Best food:  This was our first kitchen.  I think the only time we ate out was when we went to an Indian buffet, and the food was really spicy and good.  Unfortunately I don't remember the names of the curries, but they were yummy.

     Worst food:  Ramen, after the 6th day

Manu trip:
     Best food: None.  It was all bland and nutrionless.

     Worst food: See above

Puno:  
     Best food:  The pizza dinner we walked to.  It was some sort of veggie pizza, the first one we had on the trip, and it was cheesy and yummy.

     Worst food:  Breakfast.  There was a breakfast that came with the hotel and it was a fine breakfast, but since we only had one night there there were only two meals so, by default, this was bad. 

Copacabana: 
     Best food:  Cheese fondue at the restaurant of the hotel next to us.  We splurged a little and it was... very very cheesy, and there was bread that you dipped into it.  Pretty standard fondue, but it was the first time I had it and it was fun.

      Worst food:  Garlic bread at the small internet cafe we went to on our last day.  They wouldn't give you the password unless you bought something and our bus left a few hours after we were kicked out of the hotel so we had some time to kill.

La Paz:
     Best food: Here we dined in again.  There was this french-like bread that wasn't very good but was crusty baguette-shaped and we made big sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, cheese, vinegar, basil, and hotsauce.  Messy, but delicious.

     Worst food:  I don't think we ate out at all when we were here.  There was some cereal that came with the hotel, though, that was sugared and inedible.  Probably, by cereal standards, it wasn't half bad, but I've grown up eating (sugarless) oatmeal.

Sucre:  
     Best food:  A jar of pickled jalapeños we managed to track down!

     Worst food:  This wasn't actually bad, but I had really been craving taco salad and it was a big disappointment.  Not great markets and stores here, but somehow we found enough of the ingredients and some suitable substitutes to to make a passable taco salad.  For those of you who have never had this, go out and by some/make some lettuce, crumbled tortilla chips, beans, yogurt, salsa, and cheese and assemble it in that order.  Heads up:  don't substitute Bolivian sour cream for the yogurt, crisped and crumbled tortillas for the  chips, wilting spinach for the lettuce, and tabasco for the salsa.

Salt flats trip (Tupiza to salt flats to Uyuni to Tupiza again):
     Best food: There was a not-halfway-bad lasagna that we had towards the end of the trip.  Way salty, but at least we could eat it.  Remember, this is the trip with Lucia as chef, and I think I might have understated the awfulness of the food.

     Worst food:  None of it was good, but the worst was anything cooked with that awful cheese.  I have no idea what kind it was, but I could barely choke down a spoonful of anything with it so, of course, if had to be plentiful in our meals.  Nuff said.  

Salta:
     Best food:  Ahhhh, a kitchen again!  And a supermarket that has imported noodles (a must-have)!  For the first time we were able to make cold sesame noodles, one of the joys of life.  I could wax poetic about them but, in the interest of not alienating all my audience, will refrain.

     Worst food:  Nothing's coming to mind.  This was another one of those cities we didn't eat out in at all, so (obviously!) it was all delicious :).  I might have to go with the orange jam we used to make cookies (it was so hard picking just one 'best food' for Salta!).  It was good on the sweet cookie dough, but I don't recommend eating a big spoonful of it by itself.  Bitter! 

Buenos Aires:
     Best food: The dinner at the dubiously capitalized closed-door restaurant of Ilatina. First course, small spiced pineapple chunks, small melon chunks, roasted fennel, topped with some sort of sprout.  I'm not usually a fan of fruit salads that don't even pretend to try and be sweet but this worked brilliantly.  Second course was spicy beans on a fried plantain with mushed (pureéd, if you will) mango on the side, followed by an avocado ceviche and a corn patty.  I've never come close to trying real ceviche before but my parents were in raptures about this so I'm sure that it compared will.  As an in-between courses thing there was a ginger-something sorbet, that might have been mango but might not have.  Fourthly there was an aesthetically pleasing mound of sweet quinoa, followed by a cheesecake that was the only disappointment of the evening.  It wasn't bad, but it didn't compare to my mom's.

     Worst food:  Last night, the night after Ilatina, we were very excited in finding one of the few vegetarian places in Buenos Aires.  Glowingly reviewed on trip advisor, Bio had a bunch of items on the menu that sounded amazing.  Spicy seitan, anyone?  But, unfortunately, it didn't nearly meet expectations.  I didn't sample either of what my parents had, but they dubbed it 'inedible' and my dad said that it turned his stomach.  That was probably because they used the same cheese that Lucia used in many of her creations.  
     Speaking for my own dish, the mushrooms were tough and lumpy and the texture was awful and they were, since I've been using the word 'indeible' too much, 'unpalatable'. 

Bariloche:
    Best food:  About a block from where we were staying there was an ice-cream store that had a bunch of flavors, most that were impossible to translate, but I had a raspberry and lime one that was delicious.  I think the lime gave me hives, but it was worth it!  On second thought, maybe the chocolate I posted about was the best... *Rereading this I might think that I've been eating junk food  for the past three months but, while most not the epitome of healthiness, the junk is really not a big part of our diet.

     Worst food: More bad pasta here, but not particularly outstanding in its badness.  

Purito Mureno:

    Best food:  I think I had a glass of water that was pretty good...

     Worst food: Pasta.  It amazes me that, for a country that is proud of its Italian heritage, so much of the pasta is awful.  This particular batch was drowning in water and that made it completely tasteless. 

El Chalten:

    Best food:  To get to the pizza restaurant Patagonicus we had to walk to the opposite side of the tiny town.  It wasn't more than 15 blocks but the 

     Worst food:  On our last day there we stopped at a waffle place near out hostel.  It was inviting and warm and a nice respite from the gale-force wind and yes, most waffles are offputingly sweet but we decided to give it a try.  Despite the awful texture and taste of the canned fruit the waffle was pretty good but the problem was that there was too much of it.  Way to much of it.  Now, I've never had 'eat it or wear it' parents but I have this thing about eating absolutely all of the food I have before me so that it doesn't go to waste and I was very stressed by this waffle.  I appreciate the brilliance of a lifestyle, even a temporary one, where something very stressful is a waffle that is too darn big but that didn't make my parents any happier when they had to finish what I was too freaked out about wasting to eat myself.

El Calafete:

    Best food:  The breakfast that came with the hotel.  Spice bread and lots of kinds of jam and rice pudding and eggs, which I ate for the protein but covered with tabasco for the taste.

     Worst food:  Caprese salad at the mostly-outdoors restaurant.  I think I've said before, for a country that is proud if its Italian heritage the cheese on this was wrong.  Yes, I'm nitpicking but for a salad that was advertised as having mozzerella cheese on it, the cheese looked like cheddar, had the consistency of cheddar, and tasted like cheddar.  Dare I call it cheddar? 

Ushuaia:

     Best food:  Hot chocolate at Laguna Negra.  We would never have gone there if not for the hot chocolate coupons given to us by the people on the Tres Marias, but it was the best not-home-made hot chocolate.  A little bitter, cinnamony, and cayenne-y.

      Worst food:  The one time we ate out we went to a place that wasn't a pizza place, but that served pizza.  It was packed, which is generally a good sign, but the pizza the served was worse than the stuff the served at NOVA on pizza thursdays before they switched pizza providers.  

Montevideo:

     Best food: La Taqueria in Positos, with dark roasty spiciness and guacamole and large salads.

     Worst food:  The dulce de leche, which really just didn't live up to the standards of Argentinian dulce.  I plan on figuring out how to make it correctly when I get home because I don't think you can get it in the US.

Piriapolis:

     Best food:  This is so hard.  I think I have to say my birthday cake.  It was meant to be a trifle and was baked in a pot, but set up really nicely and was lemony and creamy and so so so gooood!  

     Worst food:  Dang, another place where we ate amazingly the whole time.  If I had to choose, I think I'd have to go with the bag of chips we had to go with the chipotle dip.  There was nothing wrong with them, but they weren't spectacular.  Sorry, this feels like bragging.  We just ate really well here so, please, go ahead and gloat next time you feel distinctly unjealous of what we are doing.

    And then, after this, we went back to Montevideo and from there to Buenos Aires, but I won't mention them more than once so... first half of the trip done!  It feel almost like an accomplishment and so merits an exclamation point, but I'm feeling a little sad about leaving South America and a little apprehensive about going to Asia.  Yes, it will keep us from getting complacent here, but what's wrong with a little complacency?

     I meant for this to be a food-only post but have a couple of evenings to write about here.  Day before yesterday, after going to Bio, we went to a peña for a couple of hours.  I got a little restless by the end, but the singer was amazing.

      Last night we went to our first and last tango show in Argentina, not counting street performers.  It was hard finding one that wasn't too touristy, but We Are Tango had great musicians and great dancers, and the bonus that we didn't have to listen to somebody dressed up as Eva Perón singing 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina' from a balcony.  There was also a tango lesson afterwards and it was with great difficulty that I stopped my parents form tangoing on the way home.  Feel free to feel gloat if your parents aren't like that!

     

     Unfortunately I haven't been photographing what I've been eating, but here's a tango shot.