The past couple of days have been very cooking-oriented. Here are some of the things we made:
Leche de almedras: This was so easy! We just put almonds in a blender type thing, added water, and strained it and almond milk came out! Very cool.
Queso! This was especially fun because I got to try to explain to everyone the chemistry of the coagulation situation going on...in Spanish. Muy dificil.
Gazpacho: I always thought this was the grossest thing ever, so I wasn't really looking forward to this one. The description I had been given before was that gazpacho is a cold soup/drink made mostly of tomatoes, onions, and garlic (ew?!). We made Lola's Gazpacho with all kinds of vegetables, olive oil, and vinagre. It was SO DELICIOUS. I want to get a blender so I can make some when I come back.
For dinner last night, we ate this plant called "sala". We actually just went out and essentially picked weeds and boiled them and ate them for dinner! It was wonderful and they were surprisingly delicious. The self-efficiency of this really excited me. I can't figure out what the name of the plant is in English though, because sala is just the local name for it.
Aside from all of the cooking, I also had to do some life-threatening painting jobs. Lola wanted me to paint the underside of an awning that leans over her terrace. Of course I understood why she wanted this painted - it's not like you can't see the underside of the awning from ANY POSSIBLE ANGLE anywhere on the property. Except it is and the underside of the awning is only visible from underneath it, which you can only get to if you happen to be lying down under it on the roof.
Anyway, I had started painting the regular, visible parts of the awning the day before, and got as much of it as I could reach from the ladder. Lola came back and told me to lean the ladder over the fence thing so I could reach the rest of one side, and told me we would deal with the other side later. This sounds fine, except the fence thing is about 32741935 years old and about to crumble if you put any more pressure on it. I leaned the ladder very precariously against the uneven edge of the wall, and wobbled up. I ended up painting that side literally hanging off the side of the building, clinging to a shaking ladder, dangling 30 ft above the ground, which was of course concrete. So safe, so fun.
Lola insisted that I paint the other side as well, which is ACTUALLY NOT VISIBLE at all unless you curl up under it. We got to it by scaling the house on the other side and walking across the roof. The roof in this part of the house is actually just a couple of sheets of plastic nailed together, so it's not exactly capable of supporting my weight without buckling. Lola brought out a sheet of rusty iron with nails sticking out and sharp surfaces all over. She indicated that I was to sit on this tetanus sheet to distribute my weight evenly to paint without falling through the roof. Oh good!
I climbed onto the rusty wood, and then had to sit with my legs out and my body bent over sideways to fit under the awning to paint. It was super fun because I was actually next to the sun with rusty nails poking into my butt and legs, trying to paint over what I was pleasantly surprised to discover was an active beehive! I got the hang of it after a while (kind of) and by the end was excited to explore the roof, which is obviously a fun place to be. Lola has solar panels up there that are used to heat the water we use in the house, and I'm pretty sure there's also some kind of odd wind turbine thing as well (I'll have to ask about that). Lola is not nearly as interested in her sustainable technology as I am, so in a way I'm glad I had to paint hanging off of the roof, just so I could see all of the cool things she has.
She also mentioned very briefly that the water she uses to water the plants and trees is our own recycled and purified wastewater! I want to learn more about how that system works, because it sounds really cool and must be a fairly simple and compact process if she is able to operate it just on her property.
Last night Ester, Lindsay and I stayed up watching YouTube videos. When it's just the three of us we switch off between speaking in English and in Spanish sometimes, because Ester wants to practice her English and Lindsay and I of course want to work on our Spanish. We watched the same Noah and the Whale music video maybe 98429832175843 times, and then we watched the "That's Why I Chose Yale" video, just because it's great. Apparently Ester's middle school was called "Iale" which is obivously not pronounced like Yale in Spanish, but it could be in English, so she was joking about how she went to Yale too. Except she called in Jale, and with the sentence construction she ended up confirming that she had spent 8 years in jail. I enjoyed it.
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