Buen provecho!

In Bolivia, and especially in San Borja, people eat out for most meals.

Breakfast consists of some empanadas with a little bit of cheese on the inside, some other flavored bread, maybe some fruit, like little bananas, and some coffee, chocolate drink, or tea.

Actually, in the market, most of the little stalls that serve breakfast serve meat as a main part of the meal, but that's a little too heavy for us.

For lunch, meals start with soup - usually vegetables with some meat, noodles, or quinoa. Restaurants cook all of the food at once, so you usually have two or three options. We've been eating a lot of baked chicken (pollo al horno) and breaded and fried beef or chicken (milanesa). Everything is served with rice. Lately, we've been drinking Coke with lunch - I think we've had more Coke this week than we had all of last year. It's made with real sugar and is served cold, so it's very refreshing on hot days with a hot meal. Lunch is early - if you go too late (12:30), the food might be gone.

They also always bring you some yucca to put in your soup.

Dinner is late, usually at 8pm, so we've been picking up some fruit, bread, and yogurt for an afternoon snack. Kelly is a big fan of bread and has already found a few favorites.

For dinner, there are usually a lot more options (almost all with beef or chicken and always with rice and a few french fries).

There have been a few other researchers here in San Borja working with Tsimane': my advisor, Dr. Susan Tanner, some psychologists and linguists from MIT, UC-San Diego, and a university in England, which has been nice because we've gone out to eat with them a few times (and they've very generously picked up the bill every time).  One of the nights, my advisor wanted to take us to get anticucho - which is beef on a stick but also some intestines.

Dr. Susan Tanner showing off the anticucho.

For one of the dinners we had with that crew, we went to La Costa Azul and had really awesome roasted duck.

Kelly and Dr. Susan Tanner with roasted duck.

However, Susan and the MIT crew all left on Monday. Best wishes to them as they travel back to the US. We'll miss Susan - she was a huge help getting us started on the year long process.

We've also found that dinner goes best with a cold Pacena - a Bolivian beer (a Paceno is someone from La Paz). Yesterday was La Paz day, a big festival in La Paz, so we had good reason to celebrate even from a distance.

One of the funnier things we've seen in town is that San Borja now has a wannabe fast food burger place, called Good Burger. 

One of the restaurants we really like, Bibosi, has really good kebobs and filet mignon (although it's not quite the same as in the States, but for $3.50 it's worth the price!)

Dinner is also best when followed by a coconut or papaya icepop. Helado, or ice cream, is everywhere here: from little kids pushing little carts and squeaking a horn to heladerias where they serve you ice cream pops or actual ice cream and other tasty treats.

Our next post will invariably be about the grueling bureaucratic process of getting our residency visas (preview: local police standing us up and then asking for money or other things), although other top contenders include the stray animals of San Borja.