Each morning here starts with coffee in the kitchen, and fresh bread. There’s a woman who lives somewhere here in the neighborhood, who stays up all night baking slightly sweet bread rolls, and then early morning delivering them, via bicycle. She has standing orders, like for here, and others call out their orders as she comes by, honking the little horn on her bike. A dozen rolls, 1.50 soles – that’s less than 4 cents a roll. We just leave the coins on the windowsill and she picks them up and leaves the bag there. It’s usually about 7:30 in the morning, so I seem to the be the only one awake, and when I hear her honk and then leave the bag, I just go pick it up through the window.
I had thought we’d have another day out exploring, but somehow the morning devolved into a trip to the shopping mall and a series of hardware stores, getting new tennis shoes for the youngest family member, who starts kindergarten today, and looking for some parts for the toilet tank that need fixing. Somehow or other, despite these needs having existed for months, no one made an effort to go shopping for them until Tío Dan was in the house…. I mean, none of this stuff is costly, and from our end (and Henry’s paying me back much of it once we’re back in BA), but it’s an expense for the family that they’d have to scrape together to manage. It’s more just annoying that there’s an automatic expectation that when the “rich” uncles come to visit, all will be paid for.
Anyway, on to food. It was his oldest sister’s birthday yesterday, turning 60 (the party’s this Friday, and the reason we’re here right now), and she, or he, picked a place where we could all go eat duck, Los Patos (recoup.donor.dreams), which is actually a huge complex of three different restaurants, all serving the same menu, and each has a stage where in the evenings they do shows. During the day it’s pretty quiet. And sitting in a room that is rated to handle over 1000 people feels a bit lonesome, even if there are a couple of scattered tables of other diners.
Although there are a few other dishes available, what one comes here for are the patos, the ducks. The choices are a whole small duck, a whole large duck, or half a large duck, which, respectively, we’re informed, feed 4-5 people, 10-12 people, or 5-6 people. We were going to go for the small duck, but the waiter looked at the five of us and suggested a medium duck (not on the menu, no fair!), for 6-7 people. We were 5, but he asserted that if we weren’t eating anything else, we’d want it. And we did finish it, comfortably full.
Now, it’s not exactly a single duck, it turns out, because large numbers of ducks have simply been cut into pieces and stewed in a mildly spicy cilantro sauce (seco de pato). So they just ladle out a portion equal to the volume of whatever you’ve ordered – kind of hit and miss on what parts you get. We had, roughly, five legs, three portions of breast meat, two wings, two heads, a neck, a gizzard, and a couple of small random unidentified parts. All delicious – there was some discussion at the table as to the serving of the duck with potatoes and rice instead of the traditional white beans and rice, and the family came down decidedly on the side of beans.
A couple of beers, two pitchers of passionfruit juice, and a tip, and we came in at 190 soles ($58) for lunch for me, Henry, the birthday girl, her daughter, her granddaughter (who ate next to nothing), Henry’s dad (who didn’t eat, just drank the two beers), and, of course, the taxi driver, who somehow got invited to join us. He is a friend of the family, and someone they regularly call for when they need a taxi, and it did mean he offered to drive Henry around to a couple of places to run errands after lunch, but somehow, I think he got the better end of the deal.
The errands continued, and I opted to stay at the house and get some reading and writing done….
And somehow dinnertime rolled around. Henry and I were planning on a night for the two of us – head into the center of town, wander a bit, sit in the plaza, and then get some Chinese food. Of course, that’s not what happened, as we got ready and headed to the waiting taxi, to find sister, daughter, granddaughter all ready to go out and already ensconced in the taxi (same driver, he didn’t get invited along, and wasn’t giving freebie rides anymore). Plus they’d decided to let him pick the Chinese restaurant, and he went with his favorite, nowhere near to the center of town, and probably his favorite because it’s cheap and serves lots of food. Chifa Chung Heng (taster.napkins.coffee).
Sometimes it’s just not worth arguing these things, it’s just a week here. But at some point, I would like to get Henry and I out for something… more. We settled on a family size portion of stir-fried chicken and vegetables, a regular portion of sweet and sour pork, some white rice, water for us, Inka Cola (a horrifically sweet, piss-yellow beverage that is ubiquitous here), for a total of 98 soles ($30).
Another day in the city of eternal spring….
(With the title of this post, I was going for a what3words combo that might link to somewhere interesting in the world, but no, those three words don’t link anywhere, neither in English, nor the Spanish equivalent of pan.pato.chino.)
