Considering I recently spent two days in bed/on the toilet, this seems like a great time to talk about food. First off, I can't say that Bolivian food is exactly the crème de la crème of ethnic foods. In fact most Bolivian food is pretty bland meat and potatoes fare. Also, my food throughout the day generally depends on whether I'm working or not.
I have come to enjoy my breakfast here quite a bit. On days I'm working, I have to meet my clients at a cafe downtown at around 7:15am. We don't leave though until 7:30 or 7:45. I usually take this time to duck out real quick and grab a quinoa con leche. This is served from a lady with a cart on the street corner. She already has pitcher of hot milk and quinoa mixed in. She pours this mixture in to a plastic bag, sticks a straw in and ties a knot. If you don't already know, quinoa is a grain similar to rice and is native to this region. You can find it pretty easily in grocery stores at home though too. I realize hot milk with rice in it that you suck through straw may not sound that appetizing, but I assure you its one of my favorite parts of the day. I also grab a couple small empanadas to go with my milk. Empanadas generally come as straight soft bread rolls or with cheese inside. They also occasionally have chicken, beef or pork inside. These ones I get with my quinoa con leche are just straight bread rolls. The quinoa con leche costs 1.50Bs and the empanadas cost .50Bs each meaning that my whole breakfast cost 2.50Bs. Remember, one US Dollar roughly equals seven Bolivianos. Some mornings, if I feel like splurging or if I don't have time to duck out a moment, I'll grab a muffin in the cafe for 8Bs.
However, on days in which I don't work, I often wake up much later and by 10am or so I generally don't trust milk that has been sitting in the sun all morning. So, instead I go to my own fridge where I grab either milk or yogurt to mix into my cereal. Unfortunately, cereal is not one of the cheapest items in the supermarket. This being said, it is one of the items I'm willing to splurge on. Salteñas are another common breakfast item, but I'm not too into them at the crack of dawn. Salteñas are bulbous shaped pastries with various types of meat stuffed inside. Between their size and the sauce inside, they prove to be extremely difficult to eat neatly. I'm also not generally keen on eating a meat pie early in the morning, but I do enjoy them as a snack later in the day. I haven't quite been able to master the art of eating one, but I think you need to take small nibbles and constantly be sucking out the sauce so that it doesn't dribble down you're fingers.
Next up there's lunch. During the long days of running down the WMDR, lunch comes anywhere from one to threeish, which means after a small breakfast of two empanadas and milk with rice in it, I'm pretty famished by the time we sit down to lunch. Granted we do provide a few snacks on the ride down, but I always look forward to the all-you-can-eat buffet we provide for lunch at the end (and the free cerveza of course). The buffet itself is always the same. It consists of regular spaghetti, spinach spaghetti, three sauces, a bunch of steamed veggies and a salad bar. Since the buffet lunch is always the same, the staff at La Senda Verde take pity on us poor guias (guides) and give us a plate of the staff lunch. This always includes either pasta or rice (very lightly seasoned), some sort of fried, baked or roasted meat and plantains. I have decided that plantains are only good in very small doses. I get tired of the taste quickly. I also always make sure to stock up on lots of steamed veggies, because its really the only chance I get for veggies, unless I make them at home.
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| Average lunch of fried chicken chicharron, large white corn kernals, a purple potato, apple juice and picante sauce. |
My off days are really where the dank lunch is to be had though. Lunch is considered the most important part of the day in Bolivia and most people either go home or go to one of many hole-in-the-wall lunch establishments around town. There are easily four or five places within a couple blocks of my house that serve a traditional Bolivian lunch. Its always a flat rate ranging from seven to nine Bolivianos. You walk in, sit down and they automatically bring bread and a bowl of soup out. I think the soup is often corn based, but varies widely in taste and is different everyday. It also usually has a chunk of meat in the center or very small pieces throughout. When you have finished the soup, they usually have a choice of two or three main dishes. One day, the choice was between ground hamburger on rice or diced up sheep heart. I figured, “Well, I know what burger tasted like, so I guess I'll take the sheep heart.” At first, the taste was just weird and then slowly it started to grow on me. I can honestly say I enjoyed it, but I also grew tired of the texture and was unable to finish due to the weird rubbery feeling. While I had mixed emotions, I don't think I'll be ordering it again anytime soon. After the main course, there is usually a small desert of either plantains or bananas in ice cream. This whole three course meal is always guaranteed to be a very filling and only costs about $1.
My dinners entirely depend on what time I get home from work. Usually, I get done with job stuff around 8pm, though it can vary anywhere from 6:30 to 10. After waking up at 5:45am and working all day, I'm usually in the mood to grab some street food and conk out, ready to wake up at 5:45 the next morning. You could say there is a wide variety of street food here, but in reality it is all some sort of meat with some sort of potato and a chunk of plantain for the end. Closest to my house is a small place that sells, the most generic of street food. This includes hamburgers, hot dogs, salchipapas and lomito sandwiches. Hamburgers and hot dogs should be obvious. They aren't that different here. Salchi is actually hot dogs and papas means potatoes, but salchipapas is a specific dish of basically french fries and cut up hot dogs in a paper cone and a fried plantain at the bottom. Condiments include ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise and picante sauce (usually all of the above together). Another two common street items are lomito or choripan sandwiches. Lomito is a thinly sliced piece of beef and choripan is chorizo sausage packed into a patty. Both come out as an extremely greasy piece of meat with bread and all those same condiments. A tad bit of greens and occasionally a slice of tomato. All of these items cost 6Bs or less. My favorite street food place however is a bit more. I generally head over to these guys if I'm feeling pretty hungry and don't want too much greasy digestive tract lubrication. Its on the more expensive side of street food at a flat 19Bs. For just under $3, you get about a ¼ pound of either roasted or fried chicken, rice or noodles (or both mixed together), a ball of buttery mashed potatoes fried sorta like a hush puppy and of course, a chunk of fried plantain.
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| An uber healthy dinner of a lomito sandwich, salchipapas on the side and of course a fried plantain. |
Common dinner restaurants include the local Chinese place three blocks away, a nearby pizza place/tavern and a highly non-Bolivian English tavern called Oliver's Travels that serves all the best food from home including an amazing chicken, guacamole sandwich. The pizza place is pretty good, but consistently gives me room clearing gas (not a good one for a date). I can also safely say that the Chinese here is most definitely less Chinese than Chinese in the states. Really, some of the time I feel like I'm eating Bolivian food with a Chinese name. To their credit, it is run by a real Chinese guy, but I think I may know more Mandarin than him. The Chinese place is easily the cheapest running about 10Bs per visit, plus a bit more if you get beer. Oliver's should be pretty expensive, but I get a 50% discount being a Gravity guide, so I usually escape for about 30Bs including beer. I still don't get out there that often considering that it is also a 30 minutes walk or short cab ride away.
Of course, unlike my time in China, I do have a real kitchen here and a grocery store three blocks away, so its quite easy to cook my own food. That being said, I don't that often. Its so easy and cheap to eat out and I am so often getting home too late to feel like making anything. I have made some great pastas, bought meat from the store and even found some real Kraft mac and cheese. I think the ultimate comfort food of mac and cheese really brought me back from the land of the dead after a serious bought with Capac's Revenge (my Incan version of Montezuma's Revenge).
Disclaimer: If you get grossed out easily, skip this paragraph. You would think that the street food is the most dangerous food I could be eating, but before I got sick, the only food I had was pizza from a downtown chain restaurant called Eli's New York Pizza. On the first day it hit me, I was working, but luckily had a new guide in training and a Bolivian guide with me so they pretty much did a lot of the physical work while I languished in agony from the pains emanating from my stomach. I then proceeded to spend the next two days in bed or running to the toilet every hour or so. The fourth day, I decided that I felt a whole lot better and was definitely ready to go to work, however, my bowels had other plans. Early in the ride, I realized that I really needed to go and go immediately. First, I told the other guides that I would catch up with them in the big town a few stops later and set about trying to find a bathroom. There really aren't many bathrooms along our route. First, I tried the military checkpoint, but their bathrooms were locked and my Spanish didn't seem to be good enough to express the importance of my situation or more likely they just didn't care. So, my next opportunity came up at this small restaurant sitting in the middle of nowhere between the towns of Rinconada and Pongo. The place has a small outhouse about 100 meters from the restaurant itself. This thing has two sides for men and women and each side has three holes in the ground with short concrete walls creating open stalls. Each hole has two blocks to stand on as you squat over the hole. It reminded me a lot of Asia. I raced straight down for el bano, leaving my bike in the doorway so I could keep an eye on it as I did my business. As I'm sitting there squatting and exploding out of my rear this kid rolls up on a BMX and picks up my bike. At first, I'm thinking this kid is about to steal my bike while I sit here incapacitated. Instead though, he just stands there holding my bike and starts talking to me. From my basic understanding of Spanish and the universal look in his eyes of a boy holding a sweet toy, I can tell he's telling me how cool the bike is. Other than that, he just keeps talking and I have no idea what he's saying. I can also say that I wasn't trying in the least to concentrate to pick out any key words. I just couldn't believe that this 12 year old kid is having a conversation with me while I'm squatting over a hole with ungodly sounds escaping and I don't even know what he's saying. I thought I've had some experiences pooping in the woods, but this hands down takes the cake. It even beats the time Ben pooped in a bucket on our porch a couple years back.
