I Must Get This Candy Out of My Room

I brought 6 lbs of fun-sized candy to Ecuador in my hiking backpack. This stuff makes great gifts, as Reeses, Snickers, Kit Kat and the like are very hard to find and expensive at that. I have it all planned out in my mind who I’m going to give the candy to and how much (150 pieces divided by 5 or 6, depending on how much I want to spread the love). Unfortunately, I don’t have any gift bags and Ecuadorians are pretty big on ceremony for gifts. Actually, I think anyone would be kind of weirded out if you just dumped a plastic bag full of partially melted candies on their kitchen counter. I’m working to find gift bags, but my rout to work and home is much more erudite than it was last time around. There are no cabinas for calling people, no internet cafes, no “bazar-peluqueria-deli-tiendita-minimercado-tienda-de-fiestas-infantiles” that occupied the ground floor of my old rooms.

Besides the awkwardness of giving people gifts after you’ve been hanging out with them for two weeks, the other problem is that I want to eat the candy. I’m still at that point with my hosts of not feeling comfortable walking around the house barefoot and I am constantly apologizing to the maid. I walked into the kitchen and saw she was there with a mop. She and the mop were on opposite sides of the room, but I remembered my mother’s sternness to never spoil a clean floor. I immedietley start apologzing. She’s like “whaaaaa” and keeps washing dishes. I wanted to make myself some kind of non candy snack. I need vegetables, they are usually just as garnish, thin pink slices of tomato and canoes of avocado.

Yesterday, at the subcentro, I had the most disgusting lunch. When I first looked at it, I thought it was some kind of cebiche thing. I’ve eaten raw fish before, and while its not my favorite, it’s paltable. I tasted the sauce, thick and wood colored, little half-potatoes all around. Peanuts. Raw fish and peanut? No, not fish, no blessing of muscle, just the soft give of subcutaneous fat. Oh yuck. Oh god, I’m eating skin. It’s cut into neat squares and there is plenty of sauce and potatoes and rice (yes please, I’ll have some bread with my bread) so I make do, slapping a square between a half-moon of potatoe and a pile of rice. I don’t even bother with the avocado until I’m ten squares in, there is no reason to ruin beauty with this monster of a dish.

I’ve been picking out only the cleanest, whitest squares, not even thinking about thier origin, just looking to get them into and out of my mouth as quickly as possible. As the other doctors enter, including 1 super gringa and 1 medium gringa medical students, I am only mocked for my consumption of, what I now find out, is pork skin. PORK! the dirtiest of animals! The cloven footed sin! The carried of tricknonois and Tay Sachs and botched circumcisions, killer of my people! So recently covered in bristles and rolling in mud. Un cooked, sliced and drenched in peanut butter and mayonnaise. As we are discussing this, I get down to the nastier chunks. Reddish or brownish, they cling together with bits of the skin, or the little tubes and levers that keep us in one piece. I am not eating this. Its time for rice and avocado.

Of course, my suffering is not over. We have to listen to the two gringas complain and be grossed out, discussing the minutea of the texture as I feel it swim in my stomach. I ate in silence, they push food around their plates with complaints and I want to bolt out of there and throw up in the corn plot behind the house. The dentist (who I think is kind of an alcoholic) and the Doña’s husband (the Don) are drinking beer and they offer me some. There’s the perfect 3 once juice glass filled with amber Pilsener, bubbles rising. As I accept the doctor and nurse launch into long rants about how it is deeply irresponsible to drink on the job. My glass sits in front of me untouched, my sociology textbook humming in my ears about gatekeepers and cultural customs, the pigs are flying in my stomach.