Cooking "school"

My love of food is well-documented, full of exclamations of just how delicious a given meal was or recommendations to other people about where to go get scrumptious something-or-other.

And as you might have noticed on this blog, I love the food in Peru. It’s delicious. And while I have had some success trying to replicate certain dishes or meals in our apartment (even while I miss certain comforts from our kitchen at home, such as having more than one knife, a mixing bowl instead of using a pot, and only a toaster oven), it has been more fun to create my own custom cooking school, with classes taught by experts.

My lessons began in February with an unexpected and not-very-Peruvian course on Indian food, when my friend Vandna’s parents were in Lima for a couple of months. Chanda taught me how to make chicken curry, an incredible mango salad, and my favorite: eggplant, baingain bartha. Simon wasn’t so excited about the cooking lesson and kept bringing me my shoes as a hint to leave. Finally, he dragged in my backpack too, in case I hadn’t fully understood him yet. But he ate more chicken at that meal than I have ever seen him eat, before or since.

Can we go yet?

Simon was more enthusiastic about my next cooking adventure, since it involved his favorite drink, chicha morada. It is made from purple corn and is the same delightful, rich color. Dieuwe’s grandmother, known to everyone as Mamita, is extremely proud of how much Simon likes it and apparently brags about his love for chicha morada to her friends, so I asked her to show me how to make it. 

First we went to the market to buy ingredients. It was fun to watch Mamita handle and reject a load of ingredients before telling me to hand over the money.

Looking over the purple corn

Choosing spices

Quiz: which one of the following four ingredients is not used in chicha morada?
A. quince
B. pineapple peel
C. orange zest
D. cloves

Answer: orange zest. Chicha morada is such a weird concoction of ingredients. It seems to me that someone was playing MadLibs while they came up with the recipe, but it certainly tastes good at the end. You take a kilo of purple corn cobs, remove the kernels from the cob, put the naked cobs and all the kernels into a giant pot, and fill with water. Add half of a very ripe quince, the peel of half a pineapple (but not the fruit!), six cloves, three pieces of cinnamon bark, bring to a boil and wait. After about an hour or so, the purple corn kernels will have burst slightly. Remove all the liquid and save it as chicha morada concentrate. Fill the pot again and boil for another hour or so to get an undiluted batch of chicha morada. Chill. Add lime juice and sugar to taste just before serving. 

Washing the corn

Simon enjoyed helping rinse the cobs and trying to take the kernels off

Add lots of water...

The MadLibs ingredients

After about an hour of boiling, this is what the concoction looked like. Mamita frequently took out ladles of corn kernels to see if they had burst yet.

After we made our two batches, we put the concentrate into the freezer to enjoy later. There must have been a slight leak in the bag, however, because the next morning frozen chicha morada covered the freezer, which was not the most fun to clean up. Assuming we can find purple corn at Saraga, I will be excited to surprise Simon with chicha morada on special occasions and serve it at our ice cream socials.

Of course we needed to toast before trying our batch of chicha morada!

Chicha mustaches = a satisfied Simon

My next cooking adventure was sushi, of all things. Sizable populations of Chinese and Japanese people in Peru means that markets selling Asian food are plentiful and so having a sushi class at Spanish school isn’t too far out of Peruvian bounds.

Our instructor gave us a brief introduction to sushi and explained how the end result was beautifully shaped: a perfect circle, the symmetry of ingredients, a clean look.

Symmetry is important...

There were five of us in the class, four women (one was Japanese, and she was clearly an expert already... I’m not sure why she was taking the class!), and an Australian named Ralph. As the “h” is silent in Spanish, everyone called him Ralp, which I found hilarious.

Our instructor carefully demonstrated each step and I was proud of my beautiful roll of sushi, until I cut it and realized how warped it was. This explained why my Japanese neighbor had been slightly horrified at my roll the whole time. As I assembled my roll, she would giggle and point, which eventually made me start to laugh too at the weirdness of the situation. “Too much rice! Too much ingredient!” I tried to hide it but, no luck. We all were to show each other our plates before moving on to the next dish. Ralp decided to examine everyone’s sushi, complemented everyone one by one, tasted a couple, and then got to mine. He winced. “What happened over there, Alison?” The good news was that he didn’t even try to taste mine; more for me!

Gee, can you guess which plate has my sushi on it?

Our class, with Ralp hiding in plain sight

I brought my sushi home, Simon tasted a tiny bit, but had a better time repeating his new word, tushi. Now, when I pull out paper and a pen to jot down what we need to get at the market, Simon tells me to add, “agua, tushi,” until he sees me write them down.

My final cooking experience was amazing. I took a lesson from a Peruvian-born, German-trained chef named Yurac who operates cooking classes from his rooftop kitchen. I signed up for the meal featuring special Andean ingredients and ensured it would all be gluten-free. Every course of our four-course meal was incredible. And the emphasis on presentation was huge; every time I thought our dish was done, ready to be served, Yurac had us add one or two or three more things to make it even more beautiful. 

This is an example of the emphasis on presentation. For ocopa, a spicy sauce made of peanuts, yellow peppers called ají amarillo, an oft-used Peruvian herb called huacatay, and queso fresco, we start with beautiful peeled potatoes. Peruvian cuisine boasts a wide variety of potatoes. At one point there were over 3,000 varieties in use.

I chose a representative sampling for my plate. 

We've blended the sauce and Yurak tells us to carefully spoon enough on our plates to completely cover the papas. I assume we are done and ready to eat.

Not so fast! We add the ubiquitous condiments of hard-boiled eggs and black olives. Ok, now we're done.

Except we need to add a little fan of carefully sliced ají amarillo to the dish. Now we are really finished.

Chupe de camarones y pescado. So delicious! 

Alpaca steak, asparagus, and quinoa salad. The quinoa salad has been pressed into a mold and then upended onto the plate. Peruvians are really big into molds, especially for rice. I've come around and purchased molds of my own by now - it is much more fun to eat foods in pyramids and domes. Peru grows a lot of asparagus but, Yurak told us, almost all of it is for export. Few Peruvians eat it. It was always at the mercado near our apartment, for pennies - a regular -sized bunch cost the equivalent of $1. Therefore, we ate a LOT of asparagus. The mercado vendors were shocked to hear that Simon could put away the entire bunch of asparagus by himself.

Ah, lúcuma. A more delicious fruit has not been found. We are starting to make lúcuma mousse here.

Here we go on presentation again. We each drizzled algarrobina syrup on our plates, then spooned lúcuma mousse on top. Done?

Of course not! By now I shouldn't have been surprised. Yurak showed us how to take aguaymanto, these cute little berries, each of them in their own little delicate paper-like package...

... and then flare them each into aguaymanto flowers.

While my spoonfuls of lúcuma mousse aren't exactly artful, check out the rest of the plate: the aguaymanto flowers, a twisted slice of orange, a fan of apple, and aguaymanto jam next to the mousse. What are we waiting for? Let's eat!

Yurak, me, and my classmate Michael, overlooking Miraflores from Yurak's rooftop kitchen

I wanted have one more “class” before we left for home: I wanted to learn how to make the salsas at La Pollera, our favorite pollería down the street. When I asked if I could hang out in the kitchen while they made their salsas, they told me that they would “check and get back with me.” I knew that meant “no”. However, our waiter (I say “our” waiter since he was ours nearly every time we went) knew that I wanted to learn how to make the chimichurri in particular. One night he quietly slipped me a list of the ingredients for the chimichurri that he’d sneakily scribbled in the kitchen. Yes! So I suppose I have one more cooking class, in my own kitchen in Indy, to figure out their ratios and replicate their stellar results. I even have the little wooden spoons to help create the overall effect, so it must taste the same, right?

Still, I have my eye on a very beautiful Peruvian cookbook for my Christmas present. Did you hear that, Sam? Now I'll just have to cross my fingers that I can find Peruvian ingredients stateside.

Mountains of Spanish

I have been writing this post in my head all year long, at parks, in class, while visiting artisans, at work, everywhere. And it is not finished now and never will be finished, so I finally decided just to write it as it was in my head and post it. Punto.

My goal in life is to be fluent in Spanish. I find it absolutely exciting and thrilling to speak Spanish. I also find myself capable of utter depression when I cannot seem to make words exit my mouth correctly. More than once I’ve been struck completely mute because I’m not sure how to say something really simple. After nearly a year of living in Peru, my default for how to say “what?” is still Mexican Spanish: “¿mande?” Say that here, and people look at you strangely since you have essentially just said to them, “send?”

People always say, “You speak Spanish really well!” after we’ve been conversing for 45 seconds and have covered the really easy stuff – what is your name, where are you from, how long are you here for, where do you live. And then you get into how you make a recipe or politics or phrases that involve the subjunctive and I am a little lost.

Sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to listen, distractedly, to something and later I’ve wondered whether it was in Spanish or English. I know I’ve come so, so far with Spanish this year. But how far yet do I need to go to have a job where I need to speak Spanish? That is another goal, to have to speak Spanish every day for a meaningful job or volunteer position, not just the same four sentences repeatedly, but interesting, complicated conversations in Spanish.

I used to think fluency was something you attained. It was a destination. It was the top of the mountain and I was climbing up. But the more I flirt around with Spanish, the more I study and get better and then leave off and forget it and then pick it up again several years later, the more I learn nuances and still struggle with basics, fluency looks more like a giant mountain range.

You are close to the top of the mountain now and while you realize that now you can get by with everyday interactions just fine - on the bus, at the mercado, traveling - you have so much more to learn. You still need to figure out verb tenses and subjunctive and not think so much about pronouns. You still need to be able to understand people the first time they say something, not the 3rd or 4th or never. You get to the summit and before you can congratulate yourself on how far you’ve come, you see the mountain range stretching out, infinitely, in front of you. You are exhausted and overwhelmed. There are mountains beyond mountains that you still need to climb and descend and climb again before you are fluent. Really, truly fluent.

What is fluency, really? There are so many layers and levels. I often think about other people who are speaking a foreign language fluently on one level (i.e. they get their point across just fine) but not on another (i.e. they use awkward wording or word order). Think David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day. I am at the awkward-wording and awkward-word-order stage and I wonder if I’ll ever be as fluent as I want to be, which is native-speaker-fluent, which means probably never.

Simon is another story completely. He has been fascinating to observe and talk with as he has picked up Spanish so quickly. He understands most of what anyone says to him in Spanish, and usually answers appropriately. He has been slower to use words and phrases than what I understand most toddlers do, but of the words he uses, the most important ones are in Spanish: sí and agua. He is a Spanish sponge. He breathes Spanish in like air. He has just started to say his own name, and he says it in Spanish: Simón. That has made many a Peruvian proud, let me tell you. I wonder how long he will refer to himself with Spanish pronunciation. I hope he keeps it up for a good long while.

A quote that has been omnipresent in my mind this year is something I read in college: “You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?” Jorge Luis Borges rocked my world with that one. Here I am, thinking I am communicating just fine with someone and then sometimes I realize that they haven’t understood a word I said. I think I’m saying something like, “the sky is blue” and they hear something like, “a stamp costs too much.” And we smile at each other, nod, agree, and go our separate ways. How many times do I have this conversation and think it’s gone well, only to wonder later whether we understood what the other one meant to say at all?

As much as I want to be fluent, and fluent NOW, I’m finally starting to accept that Spanish is my life-long quest, instead of something I get to cross off of my list and say that I've accomplished. So I’m trying to tackle smaller mountains and enjoy a little more of the climb. I have been reading more books and novels in Spanish, knowing that reading in English has been invaluable for building my vocabulary, understanding nuances, etc. I celebrate when I can only come up with the Spanish words for something.

I love Spanish. We are past the flirting stage and are in a long-term relationship. There is no danger of me breaking up with Spanish, like my childhood friend Jessica so hilariously and eloquently tried to do. Hopefully Spanish won’t break up with me!

My fabulous cultural guide

Silvia, my Spanish teacher, is my favorite person here (outside of Sam and Simon, of course!). She is my tutor, cultural guide, and quasi-friend at the same time. My weekly Spanish class is usually pretty awesome as a result.

My class with her feels like a cultural primer on Peru. One of my standing homework assignments is to read an article in the paper and then explain it to her. This is completely up my alley; I like to follow the local politics and attempt to understand whatever the bigger issues are. So I’ve often read articles on an issue I’m following but don’t understand, and then ask her for clarification. Her explanations always are thorough and fascinating, lending complexity that I wouldn’t have necessarily gotten from a dictionary or Googling.

Such as: there is a wildly popular Peruvian soap opera called Al Fondo Hay Sitio. My literal Spanish translates it as “At the Deep End There Is a Place.” What the heck was that supposed to mean? She explained that it was a nod to the experience most limeños have had here with packed, packed, packed buses and combis. It was a reference to what the cobrador (the guy who takes your fare once you tell him where you are going; he also helps the bus cut around in traffic via gestures from the bus windows, and leaps out at stops to yell out the various places the bus is headed, to drum up business) would say to someone who wanted to get on the bus but was doubtful there was room, seeing people crammed up and down the aisles, spilling out the doors, etc: “al fondo hay sitio” - “in the back [of the bus], there’s some room.” No one believed the cobradores but when every bus is like that, you finally get on the bus.

One week I brought in an article about the Conga project, a very controversial mining project in northern Peru. I’d been following the issue since November or December, when it initially erupted and a state of emergency was declared, but I didn’t exactly get what was going on. Essentially, a US-owned company is planning to transform a beautiful area by draining several popular lakes (also used for drinking water) and permanently changing (some say ruining) the lifestyle of many native communities in and around the area. The current president had been very outspoken against such mines before he won the presidential election last year, but now is attempting to proceed with plans for the mine while trying to ensure the mining company funds some social projects to soften the local blow.

We spent an entire hour (of my two-hour class!) discussing it. I appreciated that Silvia provided a perspective of the people affected by the mining. Every other person I had asked about it shared an opinion along the lines of, “the people who live there are stupid/uneducated/selfish/extremists, mining doesn’t cause contamination or pollution, they aren’t using the natural resources anyway but aren’t letting anyone else use them either.” My guess is that because Silvia grew up in a mining town, she can appreciate the protesters’ perspective. “But of course, the people who are complaining about the protests and the project not moving forward are not the ones who live there and will be affected by their decisions.” This is why Spanish class is fun!

She, along with most Peruvians, agrees that mining is essential for Peru’s economic growth. But this particular project is extremely controversial on a number of levels, too far beyond the scope of this blog or my comprehension of all the issues, and the situation has become so fragile that two priests have been called in to mediate. I’m not sure if the second state of emergency has been lifted there yet. Feelings are extremely hot on both sides. When I was reading a recent article about it, the supposedly neutral journalist asked one of the priests, “The anti-mining protesters are really violent, aren’t they?” This, after several protesters had died in clashes with the police. To his credit, the priest answered, “There are many forms of violence, with actions as well as words. Both sides are guilty of much violence.”

I ask Silvia questions about what I don’t understand about Lima, popular culture, anything. Sometimes I find out things with my supposedly innocent questions that I’m not sure I want to know. The Saturday paper always has an interview with some celebrity and the title of the article is called “a quemarropa con (name)”, which means something like “all the way to burnt clothing with (name)”. So I asked Silvia why it was called that. This was her response.

“When someone wants someone else killed, they shoot them. And when they want to be really, really, sure that the person is dead, they shoot them many, many times. Sometimes they shoot them so many times that the victim’s clothing catches on fire.”

At this point, I wondered if Silvia had misunderstood what I was asking, since this was gruesome and not where I expected her answer to go. She continued. “So when you read in the paper that they found a body, it might say something like, ‘Le mataron a quemarropa.’ Roughly translated, “they killed him to the point of burning his clothes.” Similarly, you can use it for an uncomfortable situation where someone is asking you lots of questions, firing them at you as if they were bullets, questions that you want to avoid, questions that aren’t innocent, questions that are meant to harm. So when they call this interview a quemarropa con alguien, they are promising that they are going to ask lots of personal, perhaps embarrassing, questions.”

I was riveted. Her answer was interesting on so many levels, from the completeness of her response to the fact that a method of killing is so much a part of the lexicon that it is an offhand, even lighthearted, title of an article. Perhaps that is yet another legacy of the internal conflict.

A less morbid but still disturbing example: I brought in an article one week about a prominent Peruvian author, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, in which he was interviewed (not a quemarropa!) and asked about an incident in his adolescence which had made headlines at the time for reasons I couldn’t understand. At school, as punishment, his teacher had forced him to pass through a callejón oscuro, a dark alleyway, of 120 students. He passed out, was hospitalized, and there was a minor scandal. I was confused. Why is a “dark alleyway” a punishment? And why does it matter how many people were in it?

“Ah,” Silvia said. “This is all too common in Peruvian schools, even now. I’ll explain it to you but I am not defending it.” She walked over to the whiteboard and started drawing. “A callejón oscuro is when you and your classmates line up side by side, facing a wall, with your hands on the wall and your feet several feet away. The alleyway is formed by you and your classmates, and the space between you and the wall.” She finished drawing it on the whiteboard. “Someone, the person being punished, has to crawl through. It can be a game, with you and a couple of friends, say, and you ruffle the person’s hair or tickle them as they crawl through. But it’s not always that innocent, and people kick and punch the person crawling through. What that teacher did was inexcusable. He gave the students permission to beat up their classmate. That in itself is horrible. But a callejón oscuro of 120 students? Imagine how many kicks and punches they could give!”

Now I understood the scandal. Learning that it’s still a frequent practice today makes me shudder. Middle school and high school can be hard enough by themselves, period, without the specter of getting beaten up in a callejón oscuro.

I appreciate that Silvia helps me navigate the complexities of Peruvian life at the same time as I navigate the complexities of Spanish grammar, pronunciation, intonation, and levels of formality in conversation. We’re in the process of figuring out how I can continue my class with her once we return, via Skype. She is just too awesome to give up simply because we will be on another continent. Hopefully she’ll decide al fondo de su horario hay sitio para mi - at the end of her schedule, there’s a place for me!

Poco a Poco

Warning – although I had mentioned that I’ll try not to have super-wordy posts, I reserve the right to have lengthy ones at times… and this is one of them! Hopefully I’ll include enough pictures here to break up the wordiness. (A side note about the pictures: Blogger is driving me crazy because I can't place them correctly without throwing off the text somehow - anyone who has tips to share, please do!)

Here we are at the end of another week, and poco a poco things are feeling more familiar. I see some of the same families at the park each time Simon and I go out. We’ve been piecing together different parts of our neighborhood and finding new ways to get places. Certain things don’t seem so strange anymore. 


Time has started speeding up again; it had slowed to a tiny crawl there for a couple of weeks when I wondered each morning how we would possibly make it through the next 18 hours or so. It’s one thing to have a lot of time on your hands and no place to be as a single person or as a couple. There are cafes to sit in, journals to write in, books to read. But with a toddler, a lot of our energy has been split between going to our classes & exploring Lima with going to parks and finding ways for Simon to play and run around. The house where we’re staying has an elderly dog, Argos, who Simon is simultaneously in love with and terrified of. Simon has also enjoyed playing with a fire truck that the señora has loaned him. It’s fun to watch his delight in riding it as well as his elation when he actually pets Argos. 

Simon is mimicking all the sirens he hears and is experimenting with different ways to use his vocal chords. He picks things up so quickly right now. Everything, such as: saying “chao” and “bien” (not super clearly, but about as clearly as he says other words), mimicking the hand motions of the señora and her son, climbing the ladder at the park, handling a very full glass of yogurt and drinking it carefully… I am consistently wowed by him. 

Each week our schedules have changed a bit as the school figures out which teachers are available when, and matches that with our one requirement that we cannot be in class at the same time (since one of us must be able to be with Simon). My class has stayed pretty constant, with the same teacher and fellow student as the first week. Sam’s gone from private classes to a group class back to private classes, with a new teacher almost every week, and a different class time every single week. It’s a good way to prepare us for constant change, no? I’m impressed with Sam and his tenacity at learning Spanish. He started studying in earnest at the beginning of this year, and has improved rapidly since we’ve gotten here. He starts up conversations with our housemates here, never mind if he has the grammar or vocabulary right. I admire his attitude and am trying to copy it more. I’m the one who obsesses over getting everything right. Ah, whatever. I’ve been able to realize that I am learning, improving, and I have ten more months to work at it full-time. How excellent! 

Earlier this week, I was seriously considering taking a break from Spanish classes. The biggest reasons I could come up with to not do this were: I need to keep learning Spanish and it provides some structure to my day. But my two-hour class was grammar, grammar, grammar, with the same tired examples thrown in. As in, we’d learn a new structure and then Julie and I would both be asked to provide examples. It was fun to be practicing the subjunctive and getting a better handle on when/how to use it, but our imaginations were limited and so we’d provide similar examples for everything. “If you won the lottery, what would you do?” “If I won the lottery, I’d travel around the world.”

Mexico is my comparison country, as it’s the only other country I’ve really traveled in as an adult; I’ve traveled there half a dozen times over the last 15 years, with stays ranging from two weeks to almost four months. I took Spanish classes for a month in the beautiful city of Guanajuato and loved the mix of grammar and conversation classes with topical classes such as Mexican history, literature, economics, and muralism. I was working on my Spanish at the same time that I was inspired by different, quirky facets of beauty in Mexico’s culture.

So I was a bit tired of grammar-only classes. I wanted more of Peruvian culture mixed in with it. Luckily, the day that I was ready to quit and go find another language school for next week, we ditched the grammar and had an incredible conversation about poverty in Lima vs. the U.S. While I am very much just beginning to learn about the rampant poverty here, it was fascinating to hear my teacher’s views and that of the other student. We joked about getting back together in six months to compare our reactions and solutions then… and while it was said laughingly, I do wish we could have that conversation.

The next day we had a similarly intense conversation about Steve Jobs, his 2005 commencement address at Stanford, and our goals and priorities in life. The following day was full of how to figure out when we are getting ripped off because we aren’t Peruvian and possible responses (“Look, if I were Peruvian, you wouldn’t charge me extra. Tell me the right price and I’ll pay it!” While I’m nowhere near having that flow off of my tongue, especially in an argument, it was great to practice.). Our teacher did an excellent job of integrating all that grammar practice in the context of each of those very real conversations. This is the class I wanted. So I left the week excited for one more week of conversation between the three of us.

I’ve been keenly missing my La Leche group in Indianapolis; this amazing group of women is one reason why my transition from being a way-over-full-time nonprofit fundraiser and manager to being a full-time mom went so easily. I found so many impressive examples of mothering and several good friends there, and nearly every week Simon and I had some sort of La Leche gathering, including a playgroup I started as a way to help more moms like me connect in between meetings. While there is a La Leche chapter here in our neighborhood, it meets just once a month, and occurred the day before we arrived in Lima. So while I know that it’s just a matter of time before our lives begin to include friends, busy-ness, and volunteering, I’ve been missing having friends for myself and familiar playmates for Simon. He plays well with the other toddlers at the parks, but he is really eyeing their cool toys and makes a go for them as soon as he has a chance. 

We have one more week of classes and the homestay, followed by a week off. Then we move into our apartment across the street from Manos Amigos and begin volunteering with them. We are really looking forward to that! While living at the house has been fine at times and excruciating at others, it has definitely helped me look forward to the next stage of living here, even though there are some things I’ve been worrying about (of course!). Once we have a little more distance between us and our current living situation, I’ll write about it and more of the humor will come through. For now, here’s to one more week of classes, meandering around our neighborhood, and yummy food!

We made it through the first week!

And so it begins… our year of magical traveling kicked off last Saturday, when we had an epic day of traveling. After an early morning flight to Miami, 8 hours hanging out in the airport there, and a 5 ½ hour flight to Lima, we arrived late at night, breezed through customs, were greeted by a giant throng of people, and were launched into a relatively warm Lima night. It took another hour or so to reach our hotel, and the epic day finally concluded. Simon was a real trooper; his day began at 4:30 a.m. and ended at 12:30 a.m., and still he was his normal fabulous self. (And he liked carrying his backpack full of his treats – see the pic.) He had a blast in the taxi from the airport: for the first time outside of a carseat and facing forward. He joyfully called out every car, truck, and bus he saw for the first 20 minutes or so... which meant he was pointing and exclaiming nonstop.

We’ve finished our first week here: a week of Spanish classes and a week living with a family. This household is very international: the señor is from Peru, the señora is from Colombia, and they have a 10 year old son. There is a retired Canadian banker who is here for another couple of weeks who is also studying at our Spanish school, a young Japanese businessman, and then the three of us from the States.

It takes about 20-25 minutes to walk to our school. More on that in another post. It’s nice to have a 40-50 minute walk in each day, something we didn’t necessarily do in Indy.

We have three weeks more of the Spanish classes/homestay.  It’s clear that the family loves Simon, but their ways of expressing it are a little much for us at times. The señora and her son have very big personalities and are very in-your-face. (Such as: one time Simon and I came out of the bathroom and were immediately surrounded by the señora, her son, and the dog. The idea of personal space is very different here!) Simon tends to be a little timid until he feels comfortable, and so the first week was full of them picking him up and trying to get him to do certain things, with him having a panicked look on his face and calling/reaching out to me. I was trying to set a balance between not offending them and responding to Simon’s pleas.

Maybe it’s culture shock, and maybe it’s just that I’m too sensitive/take things too personally, but several things are make me uncomfortable here in the house. The one that I’ll mention today is that the señora is full of opinions and is very vocal about them. Here’s a sampling: you guys are crazy for traveling with a small child; he needs to stay at home more; he needs to be with other children in a day care; he needs more clothing; you shouldn’t let him use sign language because boys learn to speak later than girls anyway and he needs to learn how to speak instead of just using his hands to communicate – it’s too easy for him; he should eat differently. Whatever!

In general, I am trying to just let her express her opinions and then just keep doing whatever we would do anyway. We probably are pretty crazy in some ways, but I think it’s pretty funny that she thinks we are doing everything wrong, yet she keeps commenting on how well-behaved Simon is, how he never cries, etc. Of course, part of that is the luck of the draw. But I’d also like to think part of it is because of how we are parenting him.

If it weren’t for our concern about Simon, it would be a pretty ideal set up. The food is amazing, there are lots of parks nearby, it’s on a quiet street, the family is generally pretty welcoming. And then the señora tries to force food into Simon’s mouth or take him into a different room when he is crying for me… no. So, in general, we reformulate our strategy day by day for dealing with the señora and Simon. If you’ve had any experience with Latin American cultures and your children, I would love to hear your experiences/recommendations!

The food in the house is incredibly delicious, of course. The juices, a different one every morning, made minutes before we come to breakfast, are fantastic. The soups at dinner… I don’t even need more food than that, if could just have two or three bowls of it. They are so, so delicious. I asked the señora this morning if she’d teach me how to make the juices and she said no. No!??! Wow, I was thinking it would be a compliment to her as well as something that Sam, Simon, and I could continue to enjoy once we have our own apartment, but perhaps we’ll just have to wing it. She said, essentially, that there wasn’t anything to it and that sometimes she would put spices in it that perhaps I couldn’t eat, being celiac, and since there wasn’t a recipe, then no. Oh well. Maybe now I’ll just ask each morning what is in it and take secret notes!

It will be nice when we feel more comfortable and at ease with things. Everything takes time, a lesson I need to relearn every single day!