An Inconvenient Life

Letting go of the life I was expected to lead.

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Kicking around the apartment in Arequipa, Peru.

Posted on 12/31/2019 by margrad80

If you are bored by minutia, stop reading now. This post is dedicated to the minutia of daily life living in different country than the one I was born and raised in.

I know that it has been quite a long time since I posted anything to my blog, but I do have a good reason. I have been getting a lot done on my novel. I will make no promisees as to when I will be publishing, but have made more progress in the last two months than I have since my writing got derailed May 2018.

As the headline for this article hints at, this post is all about things that I have found interesting while inside my apartment. Mainly this revolves around food. Living in Airbnbs in various countries, exposes me to a different sort of daily minutia.

The apartment is large and very comfortable, and I tend to shuffle around warmly dressed. Though the weather here is temperate, I have a ground floor apartment, which stays nice and cool. The bathroom has a huge skylight, which means that the bathroom is always toasty for shower time. It is cool enough most days, in the kitchen where I do my work, that I wear a hoodie and socks.

I wasn’t sure about getting new toe socks when my old ones didn’t work out, but I found that these merino wool ones come in very handy around the apartment.
My toe socks make great house shoes with my sippers (shower shoes, flipflops, or whatever you call them.)

I moved the kitchen table to the wall to use as a desk, and brought a small table in from the patio for a dining table. The patio is a very small courtyard area, that has the washing machine and the gas bottles for cooking and the water heater. I don’t like to sit out there, so the table is more useful inside. While Arequipa doesn’t have a lot of touristy things to do, it is very nice to live here. I spend most days working at my computer. Besides working on my novel and keeping in touch with my friends around the world, I spend several hours a day studying Spanish.

One day, when I was waiting for my little laptop to finish processing an upload, I noticed a strange mark on my hand. What was it? Could it be ringworm?
Looking at the other hand I saw the same mark. This hand also shows the marks from when I fell in Medellin.
Apparently I had been leaning over my computer with the palms of my hands on the posts of the chair.
Thank goodness I brought an external keyboard. The keyboard on my MacBook 12 inch, only intermittently works.

Of course, one thing that takes up a lot of my time and energy is food. The supermarket is a nice walk from here. I usually walk over to the local park and walk for a while before heading over to the supermarket. Despite all the taxis waiting outside the supermarket, I prefer to walk home with my bags, so I only buy what will fit into my reusable bags. It is about the same amount that will fit into one of the little hand baskets that most grocery stores have.

Shopping when you don’t have a good command of the language can be very interesting. I frequently get home with things that aren’t quite what I expected to get. I have found that if you want a lime you buy a lime, but if you want a lemon, you buy a Tahitian lime. Coco, is coconut, not chocolate. But all in all I have been pleased with the surprises.

One thing I have learned living in AirBnbs, is that it is more important to have one good knife than to have a bunch of knifes.
This wine was way too sweet,

I am not always pleased with my purchases right off the bat. I sometimes have to think about how to make do with what I got home with. Like the wine above, which was as sweet as Mogen David. Knowing that something with 11% alcohol wasn’t going to freeze solid, I put a glass of it in the freezer and made sort of a granita out of it. It was very good. That is how I used the whole bottle, and am now thinking about getting another one.

It made very good adult slushies.
Getting in touch with my inter college student.

I really don’t know why, but I seem to have started eating like a cadet again. Ramen is even cheaper here than in the US. I was eating so much of it, I bought some big soup mugs just for Ramen. (Mugs cost 71 cents USD each. I got four.) I also have been eating a lot of sandwiches. Plain sandwich ham is called Jamon Americano. They don’t have American cheese. Sandwiches here are typically made with mozzarella or edam. Notice below that the black octagons indicate what foods taste best.

I was feeling like having ham and cheese sandwiches, and found that here they bundle the ham and cheese together.
Typical haul from the supermarket. This cost $33 USD.The Pisco and wine where half half that.

Since being here I have spent $7.77 per day on food, and other $2.19 per day on beer, wine, and Pisco. Any prices you see on packages in the photos you need to dived the local money by three to get USD. At the store there are always ladies running around with trays of cooked meats. They carry the tray on one arm and a basket with some of the product ready to purchase on the other. I am a real sucker for them. The ladies work very hard to make me understand what they are saying. Mainly they want me to know if the meat is chicken or pork, and if it needs to be cooked before eating. I have found that the meats I have to cook are the tastiest.

Here these are called Vienna sausages. They are so much better than that. They are freshly made at the store, and you have to cook them.
There was a lot in that package. Boiling the sausages is very easy since they come in a string so you can lower them in and fish them out with ease. Sometimes some of them pop.

I have been told that Peru has the largest number of UFO sightings of any country in the world. I just have one thing to say about that, “Well … Pisco!” There are many different types of Pisco. I just get what is on sale. So far they have all been good.

I wanted to make some Pisco cocktails. I searched the store looking for a shot glass, until I realized that the glass was in the box with the booze.
The Pisco with the glass

When I was first living in South America, I was very impressed by the street vendors and the ladies at the big farmers markets, when they tied plastic bags. They tied the bags in such a way that even the very tiny bags of sauce didn’t leak.

A bag of hominy I bought when I was in Cuenca, Ecuador. It is a good example of how normal bags are used in the place of something like a Ziploc.

After having watched enough women tying the bags, in three different countries, I finally tried doing it myself. I had bought a roll of food bags at the market when I first got here, because the Ziplocs were too expensive. I was so please with learning how to do it, I showed a friend my technique during a video call to the States.

I have learned to tie storage bags alike a local. They are more airtight than a ziploc. Here I show how I put my salads together. All I have to do is dump one into a bowl with dressing.

You put the food into the bag, and smooth out as much air as you want to, before turning the top down a little. Then you take both corners of the folded top and spin the food around. this gives you two points of twisted bag to tie together. When I am storing salad, I make sure to catch air in the bag so that the greens don’t get crushed. You end up with a bag that is air and water tight. I tied to find a a video showing how this is done, but I couldn’t find one. There were lots about how do do it with heat, but not just the spin method.

So I had to record one myself.
I really have to pay more attention. I thought this read, “Crema” so I thought I was getting Cream of Wheat. it says “Germen” so now I am mixing wheat germ into my cereal in the morning.
Huancaina is a mild local sauce. This powdered from is a dry mix you combine with condensed milk and a little oil. It is really good on vegetables.
It might at first look like a hotdog, but it is a bread roil with chocolate disks and butter, just before nuking. It makes a great breakfast.

When I do finally get motivated to move away from the computer and go for a walk, I wear heavy walking shoes. The sidewalks here are far better than they were in Colombia, but you still need to protect your feet well.

Every once in a while, I will feel something scrapping on the bottom of my shoes when I get home from a walk. I often find these thorn seeds embeded in the soles.
This time the scraping wasn’t thorn seeds.
Oh, it was a earring.

Well, that is all from inside the apartment. In a later post I will have the photos from my more recent walks. I really should go out walking more, but there are only so many hours in the day. Writing and studying take up a lot of time todos los dias.

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My Inconvenient Live

I am a retired American Merchant Mariner.  l was living a nomadic lifestyle somewhere between being a nomad and an expat, before Covid19. I moved from country to country as my visas ran out. This blog covered my travels and the random thoughts about life, technology, travel, and the Oxford comma. Now I am stuck waiting for the pandemic to pass. During this time my posts will have very little to do with traveling, and more to do with keeping myself entertained during lockdown.

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