AUTUMN’S ADVENTURES

Ok so It has been quite some time since I cut my relations off with Dani.  About 3 months, I’d say.  I think I’ve seen him/talked to him a total of 5 times in 3 months.  We used to talk at least 3 times a week.  Whatever.  Normally when I get involved with a guy and I cut it off, I forget about them completely. Another one tossed to the wind.  I’m not one to pine over my ex and continue to keep in contact with them.

Since I have a limited set of friends here in Jujuy and Dani is part of a group of my 10 friends I figured we could put our silly past behind us and go back to being friends if I gave him some time and some space.

This past month I have texted him casually inviting him to hang out and we did hang out once.  It was fine and I thought we were back to normal.  Since then, I have texted him about 2 times to get together and he said in a nutshell “if I’m not doing something else, i’ll text you.” Oh really? Thanks, asshole.

I can’t be stupid and think that boys are just lame in the US.  They are lame everywhere and no matter how good of friends you start off as, if you get involved with each other you immediately ruin all chances of continuing a normal friendship.

I guess I don’t really care if Dani and I are friends anymore.  I have other friends that want to hang out with me and I enjoy their company more.  I just thought I’d give him one last chance before he became just another aquaintance that I saw on the street and said hi and goodbye to.  What a shame…

I did it! I did it! I successfully cooked the rest of my quail eggs with minimal mistakes!  Let us relive the experience via blogpost:

I went to the grocery store and bought a little metal bowl, the perfect size to make the perfectly fried mini egg.  This bowl is obviously not meant for a stove as it is tiny, doesn’t have a handle and is probably made of some metal that would warp under intense heat, but I had a freakin’ genius plan.  I was going to set the bowl on a flat skillet so the heat would be transfered from the skillet to my little bowl.  I also bought some Mazola no-stick pan spray so the eggs would slide easily out of the bowl with zero assistance from a fork or knife.  These delicate little eggs would surely be destroyed if I tried to free them from the bowl with a utensil.  So far, plan is still a genius one in my head.  I’m feelin’ good in the checkout line.

I decide that it is best to try not to cook the multiple parts of the meal all at once.  I am not that coordinated yet when it comes to food.  First I will fry the eggs, then I will toast the baguettes.  No burning or overcooking will occur this way.

I created a system with frying my eggs.

Step 1: Mazola the shit outta my metal bowl to ensure it is a slip-n-slide for my finished eggie-poo.
Step 2: Gently crack open the tiny shell with a knife so as not to rupture the yolk.
Step 3: Put egg in bowl, sans shell bits (quite difficult).
Step 4: Put bowl on skillet, cover bowl with a makeshift cover (a metal measuring cup).
Step 5: Carefully remove bowl from skillet with oven mit and slide egg onto plate.

This system worked out perfectly! I was amazed with myself.  I did manage to drop one egg from the bowl en route to the skillet and get bit by an ant during my egg assembly line but overall it was a sweet and I didn’t even burn myself!

Next, I toasted the baguette.  I made sure to pay attention to it this time so it wouldn’t burn.  They all came out perfectly toasted and I was praying to my non-existent god that all this work would taste good in the end.

I decided to spice up my recipe with a bit of cream cheese.  I spread this delicious dairy on my baguettes before laying the eggs down.  My little platter of eggie baguettes didn’t look very professional but when I took my first bite I knew I had done well.  Cream cheese makes everything taste a billion times more delicious.

I suppose I can say that “practice makes perfect” in terms of cooking.  Oh, and having patience also helps.  Here’s one point for me in the cooking department!

And so continues my constant battle with cooking.  Today I prepared some chicken and to my dismay I didn’t realize that a chicken breast wold come with a chicken breastbone.  I had to cut the chicken from the bone which proved to be immensely difficult.  I had to cut off the fat and the skin which was slimy and unenjoyable.  I much prefer preparing steak or pork — not slippery, salmonella-filled fillets of chicken.  SICK.  I think from now on I will purchase cooked chicken because I really just can’t stand handling raw chicken breast.  The experience is just too jarring.

My yoga instructor asked me if I wanted to start yoga school in April to learn how to be a yoga instructor so I could teach at his studio.  I was kind of in shock.  Not only do I think I look like a big blob of skin and fat rolls tied into a pretzel on my yoga mat (Lauren can attest to this…it is not sexy), BUT I can’t do a lot of yoga moves.  I mean, I know I’d learn everything in the school but I guess I just didn’t see what he saw in me and why he’d want me to teach.  I hope I’m not his best student because that would be kind of embarrassing (for him and for me).  I do think it would be kind of cool to learn more about yoga and potentially teach.  I’m all about learning new skills.  The school is a 3 year program, 2 if you just want to be a basic instructor.  I think I might give it a shot, depending on how expensive it is.

I love grocery shopping.  I think I love it more than clothes shopping.  Seriously, I could spend hours in the grocery store, partly because I can’t make up my mind on what to buy and party because I want to examine every single item on the shelf.

I especially love grocery shopping in foreign countries because there are always such weird and random (and sometimes totally gross) things that I have to buy them and try them to see why exactly they were sold for consumption.  I love discovering new foods.

Today was probably my 3rd time this week that I have been to the grocery store.  I go frequently because I buy fresh meats and vegetables because our freezer is small and I can’t really freeze anything.  I like it this way.  I digress…

Today was a magical day of discovery at the Carrefour Supermercado.  I was walking past the egg section when there I spotted the oddest looking eggs.  Never before had they been on the shelf in my 5 months of living here.  I was taken aback. I had to get a closer look.  These eggs were a fraction of the size of chicken eggs and they were speckled black and white.  For a moment I thought that maybe they were some small dinosaur eggs but obviously this could not be the case.  On the package it read “Codorniz” so I assumed they were eggs of a Condor.  Kind of random and weird to eat Condor eggs…so I had to have them.

When I got home I looked in my dictionary and I couldn’t find the word.  WHAT THE HELL?  I looked up condor, no translation.  Turns out I was spelling the spanish word wrong while I was looking it up and I finally found out that Condoriz means “Quail”.  Not as exotic as the egg of a condor but I was still excited to try them.

I googled cooking instructions for quail eggs.  Apparently these little puppies are big in Thai food and other asian countries.  I was eager to eat them fried versus omelet style (I’ve always been a dippy egg kinda girl).

I went upstairs to experiment with my dino eggs by toasting a sliced baguette, buttering it and slapping on my mini fried eggs.  Sounds easy, right?  Not for someone as cooking impaired as myself.  I ended up not paying attention to my baguettes while they toasted, and they burned. Real bad.  Almost not edible (to those who can eat almost anything).  Definitely not edible to those who have a sensitive palette for food.

When I was looking up fried quail egg I saw a photo of the quail eggs being fried in this muffin-top-like-pan where they were all neatly distributed and perfectly round.  Too bad I don’t have a muffin-top pan.  I tried my best to make these eggs with the flattest pan I had.  Unfortunately our stove-top is not level so the eggs and their tiny little yolks all slid to one side of the pan, huddled together like penguins.   “F*CK” is what I kept repeating over and over as my baguettes burned and I tried to separate my stupid little dinos.  The egg white spread itself thin and burned instantly.  The yolks overcooked and the whole friggen project was a culinary disaster.  I ate all of it anyway, unsatisfied and disappointed in myself.

I still have some eggs left and some hope that I will solve this frying pan problem.  I’m going to the grocery store again tomorrow to look for a tiny frying pan or something that will work for these itty bitty eggs.  Wish me luck!

I lied about having a boyfriend today so that a guy at my gym wouldn’t pursue me.  I don’t like to do this very often because I like to consider myself an honest person and usually I can handle telling guys the truth and dealing with the repercussions…but not here.  I have already been in a few situations where I told the truth about my super single status and I was grilled for at least an hour as to why I didn’t want to date said guy who is grilling me with questions.  It is hard enough to speak let alone communicate to someone politely in another language that you just don’t find them sexy.

So here I am. Living a lie. And I’m fine with it.  I’m actually thinking up a fake identity for my faux-boif just in case I still get grilled with questions.  What should I call him? Fabio???

My Argentine friends that have my email have started including me in their spanish email forwards.  Most of the forwards are centered around love.  Some of them are centered around telenovelas.  Almost all of them are in PowerPoint format.  Does anyone else think that is strange?

Mischa and Mishu are the two cats that live in my house.  Their names apparently stand for “Kitty Kitty” like…”Here Kitty Kitty!”.  These cats are abnormally affectionate to the point where I start to wonder if they were injected with some Love Potion #9.  They follow me around the house everywhere, rubbing themselves against my leg, sometimes hopping on the counter to get closer to my upper half where they continue to rub themselves on me.  If I am far away and they can’t find me (say I am downstairs and they are upstairs), they will meow for me.  They will keep meowing until they find me and once they do they immediately cuddle up to me.  They push themselves under my arm so that I am participating in the cuddling.  Sometimes they rub their head against my laptop (this bothers the shit out of me).  Sometimes they will lick me as if to clean me and say “there you go, honey — love ya!”.  If they can’t be with me they are always cuddling together.  I have never seen such loving cats in all of my 24 years of having cat after cat as a pet.  It is the strangest thing but at least I had 2 Valentine cuddle dates tonight.

Here are some things that I love right now…

This past weekend I went to Tilcara with my good friend Glenda and her boyfriend, Jose.  We prepared food on Thursday night to bring with us so we could save money (not that I need to, but my friends here aren’t so lucky to have the exchange rate that I do).  We baked chicken for sandwiches, made chicken milanesa and ham and cheese pie.  We bought cookies and fruit and juice mix for our trip.  It was going to be a jolly good time.

We left at the buttcrack of dawn, aka 9am (I do not see this buttcrack very often).  Needless to say I slept for the entire 2 hours of the bus ride there. I missed the scenic mountain views from the bus window. I didn’t care.

When we arrived, Jose and I hung out at the bus terminal eating picadillo (a type of pate) while Glenda went searching for rooms for us to rent for the weekend.  She returned 20 minutes later with a big smile, telling us she found the perfect rooms for the perfect price: 20 pesos per night (about $7 dollars).  Glenda and Jose had a room with a double bed, my room had bunk beds and a night stand.  The walls were made of cement but I could still hear every whisper that Glenda and Jose made in the room next door.  I ended up hearing them having sex about 5 times and texted Glenda from my room in the middle of their sex romp just to be a jackass.

We spent Friday walking around Tilcara, shopping at all of the craft stands and walking into random stores.  I bought two necklaces and a bracelet that were totally cute.  We drank Terere (cold mate with juice) in the plaza and watched others go shopping.  We went back to our room, ate ham and cheese tarta and took a siesta.  I never had such a satisfying nap in my life.

Friday night we went to a bar and watched live tango and folklore music. It was so delightful.

Saturday we shopped some more and went to Pucara, ruins of an old villiage in Tilcara (with tons of cactuses and a view of the mountains to die for).  We drank more terere while atop of Pucara, staring happily at the mountains in a perfect afternoon.  For dinner we went to a bar and ate some delicious dish of potatoes and melted cheese, then had a pizza and 2 huge beers.

Sunday we went to a town 10 minutes from Tilcara called Maimara.  There was a festival there with really a really noisy sporadic parade.  People were playing instruments but not really playing the same song…it was a disaster.  We ate corn on the cob with goat cheese. It was freaking delicious but a tad bit messy.  Maimara was kind of boring but the mountains were delightful, as expected.

To see photos of my chill ass weekend, check out my flickr page.