Dinner, Comida, Dîner

Tonight I am making dinner for the volunteers. There are 14 of us now, which is quite a lot! Especially when you are trying (aka have to) make the dinner for under 30 soles, which is around 10 dollars. Daunting? No, not when everything is so cheep here. Tonight we are making a curry and rice dish.
We make dinner in pairs, every night 2 different people are in charge of thinking of something to make, going to the marcado, getting all the ingredients and preparing the dinner for 8 in the evening. Today I am making dinner with Lila, a girl from France. She doens´t speak much English, so we communicate in a wonderful mix of french, spanish and a few english words thrown in when I don´t know what the word would be in spanish or french. It was so much fun! At one stall, we were trying to buy a few onions and maybe some other vegetables (legumes) and trying to communicate what we wanted with the Señora at the stand. Trying to explan what curry is to someone who has no idea what that means in a language that is not your own with someone else who is comming at it from another angle is a fun and incredibly hillarious task. I am glad the Señora had a good sense of humor about it all.
At the mercado chicken comes freshly plucked for you. Often, there are whole ones hanging by their feet from the front of the stall. The man we bought our chicken from had some cut up into pieces, luckly for us! I didn´t want to deal with a whole one. Indeed, dealing with parts of one was enough to turn my stomach a little bit and make me wish I was a vegetarian!! We asked for white meat, so he brought out his butcher knife and Wam! Crack! there was a brest of a chicken for us. He only had one chicken that was partially disabled like that so the other two we bought were legs. I am just glad he chopped off the feet before giving it to us. I think that would have been a little too much for me. As is, we had to take back the chicken parts, de-skin them and try to cut them into managible portions. We also decided that the neck was not a delicacy that we wanted to eat this evening. That got put in with the skin and gizzards. Lesson learned? Meat is gross.
So we shall see how this dinner turns out! I am excited and glad that I am here, learning so much and surrounded by people and things that are so foregn to me. Also, my english has gotten a LOT worse since I have been here. I find myself writing and thinking and speaking as I would speak in Spanish. No good. I guess that just means that I am being present in my time here!

Also, I got sunburned a few days ago. Every day here is around or more than 80 degrees at some point. So much sun! There is no way that it is mid november all ready!

Okay, off to cook...