I meant to say: I love fruit and I love the rice, beans, carne, ensalada combo. So at least I’ve got that going for me. But there are many other staples of the Dominican diet that are less than appetizing:
1. Viveres, ie. things that grow in the ground. You might think that sounds great and healthy. Actually, it means starch. Potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes (different from ours), and green plantains. General practice is to boil these items into huge flavorless mounds of starchy filler, then put things like salami or eggs on top. Dinner! (Sometimes good, depending on how they’re made, but generally… not.)
2. Harina: sweet oatmealy soupy thing. Mostly just sugar. Dinner!
3. Cereal full of ants, ie. don’t leave food open in the Dominican Republic (or maybe anywhere?) and then expect people to eat it like tons of ants swimming in the milk are no biggy. Breakfast! Or Dinner!
4. Milk in a box that doesn’t need to be refrigerated until opened. ‘Nough said.
5. Fried fried friedness.
6. Sugar applied to EVERYTHING in great heaping spoonfuls. Oh, you only put two huge spoonfuls of sugar in your shot-sized glass of coffee? Here, let me give you some more sugar.
7. Papaya (unless it is made into a papaya milkshake or other papaya product that is not straight-up papaya). If you’ve never tasted papaya… you’re not missing anything.
8. Bacalao (depending on its form). Fish. I like it one way my host family makes it, basically fried in long strips. But they also make some extremely salty and fishy mixture with the same fish, which seems to activate my gag reflex.
So lunch is generally good, because it is the rice, beans, carne, ensalada combo. Breakfast and dinner are more of a surprise. I say gracias a Dios when I see pan y queso waiting for me for breakfast. (The alternatives range from ant cereal to ridiculous things like creamy pasta/French fries.) I would kill for some mozzarella. Humus. Arugula. Yum.
In other news, I went to my first quinceañera yesterday. To sum up:
It involved a lot of sitting around and waiting for the birthday girl to show up (she apparently spent most of the day in the salon, getting ready), then watching her be paraded around in a dress, a cowgirl outfit, and another dress (yes, THREE costume changes) while everyone she knows took pictures. Kind of hilarious. She looked mildly uncomfortable about the whole thing. There were also two or three choreographed dances thrown in there for good measure… picture a dozen 14/15 year old Dominicanas dressed as cowgirls and dancing in unison in front of a large crowd of family, friends and acquaintances. So great.
It was definitely more elaborate than the wedding I went to last weekend. This could partly be due to the fact that everyone actually watched the “ceremony,” which consisted of a priest saying many words, Esmerelda’s mother putting make-up on her face, her father changing her shoes from the flat sandals she was wearing to huge, silver, sparkly heels, and then her mother putting a tiara on her head. All meant to symbolize her shift from childhood to adolescence. Then she spent a long time sitting on her throne while people (including us) took five million pictures…
Esmerelda in her princess dress with her posse of cowgirls.
Keeton, Dave, me, Carlitos, Melani y Guillermina con la quinceañera.
That was really funny actually. Also, apparently all the jovenes thought that Melani was MY baby. When they found out she’s Guillermina’s granddaughter, one girl was like, “Pero parece como esa gringa!” (But she looks like that gringa!) People keep thinking that this child is mine. Probably because her actual mother looks like she’s 14 years old. (She’s 21.) Awkward. Not actually, because nothing here is that awkward. There is no word for “awkward” in Spanish, which I think reflects the culture in general. Everything just…is.
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