Food Update!

I´ve been here nearly a week, so here´s a breakdown of what I´ve eaten.

The Good: I love fried bananas and passion fruit juice. It´s delicious. Also, today I got my daily serving of potatoes in french fry form, which I can totally handle with a bit of salt and ketchup. With the french fries I had some sort of cheese-eggy thing. It wasn´t an omelet, but it was edible and I ate the whole thing.

The Bad: Now I understand why more than one guidebook said, If you don´t like potatoes, you probably shouldn´t go to Ecuador. But I´m stubborn and I came anyway. I´ve been served potatoes every day that I´ve been here, mostly in soup. They´re still not growing on me.

The same old: In Ecuador, they eat their big meal for lunch, then soup for dinner. Every day. I don´t like soup. I don´t even eat it when I´m sick, I´d rather eat ice cream, but apparently I´m a soup eater now. I´ve eaten it every night I´ve been here. Not once has the soup not included potatoes. Of course, we all know about the potato vegetable soup disaster. Then on Monday night was pumpkin soup with UFO´s (unidentified food objects). On Tuesday, I had a soup eating crisis. Floating in the soup was bits of corn, still on the cob. Am I supposed to eat the whole cob? Take the cob out and nibble? Cut the corn off the cob with my spoon? I decided to wait and take my lead from Elvia, when she must have seen the confused look on my face and instructed me to pick up the cobs out of the soup, nibble on the corn, then leave the bare cobs on the plate next to my soup bowl. Ah.

Tonight, however, I may actually avoid the soup. This evening´s activity is a cooking lesson, and we´ll be making empanadas.