Eating

overcast and cool

Sunday morning and breakfast, let me back up a couple of days.  Since we have been away from Island Sol there is no food on board, or rather no fresh food on board as you can imagine.  So, it is off to town in our launcha, Solita.  We are somewhat closer to town from our new marina, but yet still far enough away to not hear all the jack brakes from the 18 wheelers that roar through the main street of Rio Dulce.  There are many store fronts along this road as well as individual market stalls selling everything from Chinese flip flops, American clothes (of course not new), pots and pans, medical drugs (you can buy Cipro and Amoxicillin and many more) and then food.  Lots of the food here is unknown to us which until we can ask someone how to fix it, we avoid it, like juisquil.  Juisquil (/we skill/) is a type of squash, but to my taste it is very bland.  They have broccoli, zucchini, carrots, cabbage, onions, potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers in abundance on Saturday and then these dwindle down during the week to really sad looking veggies.

pizza oven

On our day into town Friday we stopped at SunDog, a local restaurant, owned and run by an American.  He specializes in pizza and it is excellent pizza.  SunDog, we found out, had moved down the street and is in a new location and is much larger.  Unfortunately you have to wait for really good pizza, but you have a nice view of the river and all the people coming and going.

Next door is a new panderia (bakery) run by a young family.  They invited us into the "kitchen" to see all their breads and rolls.  We purchased 2 small loaves of french bread at the cost of 4 Qs.  (The money is call Quetzales and is locally called Qs).  So 4Qs = 52 cents US, what a bargain and it was hot and soft and we couldn't wait to eat it.

The Dispensia is the large "grocery store" in town.  In the summer it is sweltering in there as there is no AC in this town anywhere we have seen.  It has a large meat case and one very small vegetable cooler maybe 6' wide.  We do find very nice french green beans here most of the time. Well I could go on and on about this store, we are glad it is here, but it is not the end all of our food hunting.

So yesterday as we were preparing all of our bags/backpacks to travel into town to shop, we heard on the radio that Esmeralda was at Catamarans.  Yipee!  Esmeralda is a local woman who has her own store out of her boat and she travels from marina to marina around the river until all is sold.  We zipped across the river to Catamarans and found her at one of the docks.  There we bought a beautiful large head of fresh broccoli, 2 eggplants, some sweet mandarins, swiss cheese, 6 huge pork chops (as in thick) and some bratwurst. Half of our shopping list was done, but we still needed to go into town.

So back to Sunday breakfast, a nice omelet with swiss cheese and that French bread toasted. Ahh it is nice to be in our home cooking again.  Charlie the captain/chef can do wonders with anything so Saturday night dinner was that great head of broccoli, some fried eggplant and grilled pork chops with a fairly good Cab.  Then we settled down and watched 2 more episodes of 24 on the computer.  Our friends Jonesy and Terri, s/v Nikki Wikki, let us copy there disk of TV shows and movies, it should keep us entertained for some time.  Until next time....