Tuesday morning ( Jan 11th)
Midnight has come and gone and dawn is fast approaching. A quick shower has helped alleviate some of the night’s humidity and I have taken the unusual step of turning the aircon on for the night (Usually it’s only needed during the day)
Dinner tonight at the Alhambra hotel was a quite delicious ‘Traditional Nicaraguan Comida Tipica” Consisting of skewers of beef, pork and chicken, pan fried plantain, deep fried plantain, fried “salty cheese”, seasoned ground beef, tortillas, salad and stewed brown beans, it was more than sufficient to feed the both of us. The remainder, wrapped in foil for me to take home, made it about 500 feet before it was eagerly accepted by one of the local “street dwellers”
Walking back to the hotel along the Calzada (the main pedestrian street) we met up with a couple from Toledo, Ohio whose path we had crossed on the way to Leon last week. Swapping travel adventures we chatted for a while before we continued on, leaving them to enjoy the rest of the evening while they awaited their ride to Managua for a 2am flight home.
Our own weekend adventures at San Simian concluded with a somewhat overdue taxi pick-up that brought us back to Granada shortly after 3pm on Sunday.
Following the “obligatory” siesta we headed to Jimmy’s (Jimmy Three Fingers Restaurant and Bar) for a farewell meal with our acquaintances from Kingston, Ian and Rob. They were catching a red-eye back to Miami and then on to Toronto.
While there we had a fairly lengthy chat with the owner about life and business in Nicaragua. It turns out that he was formerly a musician on the bar circuit in the USA a few yeas back. He told us quite a few stories- how he got his name, how he purchased the delicious steaks he serves, how much of a headache it is to run a restaurant in this town etc. etc. On asking him about handmade guitars, his response was that nobody in the entire country had a clue how to build a decent guitar. As I had discovered in Masaya, he told me that they are hard to tune and generally speaking, will not stay in tune.
He also alluded to the fact that he needs some help in his restaurant kitchen, but that he could be worse than Gordon Ramsey if things got too crazy. I might take a chance and offer to work for meals once Susanna heads home!
This morning (Monday) I spent three hours roaming the local market while Susanna manicured, pedicured, cut and tinted a few hundred Cordoba away ($35)
Wandering the market is definitely not a task for the squeamish and might be considered a motivator for anyone considering going vegetarian. Barely recognizable animal parts that might be generically described as meat were heaped in piles on various wooden tables and slabs with not a cooler or refrigerator to be seen. The deeper one penetrated the market, the more unsavoury the cuts appeared to be. When one considers the supposedly meticulous but often criticized meat inspection process in Canada, one wonders about the whole system. Can a small local cattle industry involving home slaughtering, market sale and no refrigeration or typical supermarket hygiene standards offer a safer product than the mass produced USA style “”meat machine?” that supplies most of the supermarkets in north America?
Tucking into a perfectly cooked and delicious grilled chicken breast for lunch today at a small local restaurant, I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment