News

-

"I'm really not that different, you just made me think so."

What's up?

---

mood: weird
now playing: acdc-stiff upper lip
vocabulary: quedar

My yesterdays....

• Que paso? - 2006-09-10

Ok, so this was totally crazy. I went to the mall with my roommate last night with the intention of buying souvenir-like items for the various peoples on my list and maybe even for myself. We chose one mall over another because we had just gone to the other. Well, it turns out the mall we went to did not have a store like the one at the other mall with all these turisty items. So, we went into the "Disco Natural" which is a huge grocery store. Now, I say huge, but that is by Montevideo standards. Most of their grocery stores are smaller than a typical Walgreens. Well, this one was about half the size of a Kroger, which is incredible here.

We walked around gaping at everything. My roommate had not been in a Disco before so she was totally surprised. We found salsa! There were two kinds" taco sauce and mexico sauce and we bought both because we may never find them again. Ok, now they have never heard of tortillas here so tortilla chips are out of the question...they have, however, imported all types of Pringles and that including those pringles tortilla chips! So, sometime this week we are having ourselves some chips and did...something so abundant in Tennessee that I had taken them for granted. I think I would kill for a bagel. If anyone wanted to send me a bagel priority mail...lol. The food is very bland here. All the restaurants, no matter what they are called sell the same things, all pretty much globs of fat or tasteless carbs:

Milanesa-a country fried steak type of thing. It's beef or chicken dipped in flour and fried. Simple enough. Only they eat it with globs of melted muzarella cheese, which they eat very much aged here and which I cannot stand, here anyway. These people do not understand cheddar.

Empanadas-sort of hot pocket type things with flaky pastry outside and ground beef or ham and cheese or corn on the inside...but not only that, sometimes they stick random things in there like raisins. Ground beef..and raisins. That is about all the flavor you can expect.

Pizza-They sell pizza everywhere, but pizza is not pizza. It's more like a hunk of dough with some very thin sauce on it and globs of muzarella.

Hamburgers-These you can get neopolitano, which means a hamburger with a huge slice of like lunchmeat ham and melted, surprise surprise, muzarella. Regardless of how you get it, under the patty will be a couple slices of hard-boiled egg. I cannot fathom why.

For drinks you have the option of Fanta orange, Pomelo (grapefruit flavored stuff), Coca Cola, Coca-Cola light, water with gas, or water without gas. The people here really only drink carbonated water, something I cannot really understand. And at a restaurant there is no way to get a water free, they only give you bottles of water, so if you're trying to be cheap, there is no benefit to buying water.

The desserts are fairly interesting...most of them are ice cream. There is ice cream everywhere here. On the dessert list at a really fancy restaurant is like...ice cream, ice cream bar, ice cream and cake, cake, mousse. I do not care much for the dessert here, or any of it really. Raquel, our cook, she makes very good flavorful foods. But, she makes non-uruguayan foods. Well, that is not fair, it is not just uruguay, it's all of southern cone south america. Raquel makes fajitas and rice and other good tasting foods. She makes a good amount of pasta too..but one pasta I will not eat is nohkis. I forgot that on the list. Nohkis are like potato-stuffed tortellinis. So you are eating hunks of potatoes surrounded by pasta topped with "white sauce" or red sauce. This is not alfredo sauce or anything we as Americans associate white sauce with, it is simply..."white suace," the contents of which will forever be unknown to me.

I did find this cereal called sweet crunch, and I think it is like captain crunch tasting if my memory serves me right. I have decided to live on a diet of cereal and fruit and some vegetables. Eventually I am going to cut out carbs and go to tuna and vegetables and hot dogs perhaps. For us insulin resistant people, carbs are like dooming us, but they are just so good!

So yeah, I had a really twisted dream last night. I was coming out of somewhere, work or class perhaps, and this guy grabs my arm and says, "Come on, we can go." And I'm like..go where? And he says, "I bought the license in Cuba, we're already married, let's go." Now, this did not freak me out because he was a guy I knew, and evidently was into romantically but that had never actually let me know he liked me. So it was some really close guy friend or something who I evidently had the hots for but could never date. So I ran away with him. It was very weird. When I was eating my sweet crunch this morning I was, "I had a really weird dream..what was it?" Then I remembered, but I could not remember the face. I remember being so ecstatic that was him and now post-dream I cannot remember for the life of me who it was. It was someone fairly light-haired, which is weird, because I very seldom dig light-haired guys. Perhaps the fact that I am very secluded down here from actual phone contact or contact in person with anyone I really care about has caused me to have all the weird dreams I have been having. My roommate told me an interesting dream that she had the other night that weirded me out a little bit. lol. It was...odd, to say the least. I do not think my dream means anything, but at this point in my life I do so wish it were prophetic. Being down here with the same people day after day and seeing them for so many hours of the day is driving me insane. I miss people. Funny thing is, I miss people that I never spent that much time with at all. The fact that I do not have the option of spending time with them makes me want to I suppose. Weird. Or maybe, my priorities and/or tastes are changing from being down here. Who knows. A little less than three more months of this...good times.

Ok, this is long enough. Gotta run.

Check you later,

Jenn