(Downtown Gardiner. That’s pretty much all of it too.)

That’s right; we rented a car in Lexington, Kentucky and drove to Maine. Via Pennsylvania, New York, Boston, and those excellent booze warehouses in New Hampshire.

Once more, we imposed ourselves upon our friends Kurt and Ilana (and Kurt’s mom, Karen, whose kitchen we totally commandeered on a nightly basis), who have since moved from LA, where they were our last visit. Kurt was in the midst of remodeling a very old downtown brick building that was originally plastered, quaintly, with horsehair. Plucked horses. Holding the plaster together. Kurt is a modern man though, and was using drywall to cover up the mayhem. His tenants had recently moved out of the top floor apartment so we got an entire apartment for our very own during our stay in Gardiner. It was a cute place right downtown and our neighbors were extremely friendly and had names like “Stoner Dave.”

(You know, just the local beverage and redemption place.)

We spent the majority of our Downtown Gardiner, Maine mornings on the prowl for breakfast. We started with the Isamax Bakery, a place I learned was named after the founder’s two children—Isabella and Maxx, not after some gnarly industrial detergent, and famous on Oprah for Whoopie Pies.

And we bought some Whoopie Pies.

(Here’s a really big one! You have to love it. I love it.)

Joshua went with the ‘classic’ and I went with some newfangled ginger cookie one. The coffee was good. The Whoopie Pies were, um, well, we were not interested in eating the entire things to find out. They are sort of like Hostess except homemade—a chocolate cake thing with “cream” inside. But the cream is really weird, dense but airy and sort of grainy, despite assurances by the bakery lady to the contrary. Evidently there are a lot of people making whoopie pies in Maine but Isamax is the original. For what it’s worth.

The next day we made it about thirty feet more to Bagel Mania. Coffee is okay (the Isamax coffee was actually better) and DAMN do they put a lot of cream cheese on their bagels. Breakfast #3 was at the bakery almost to the corner. Coffee was not very good but the cookies and pastries were great. I had this almond and white chocolate chunk cookie that was packed with much butter so that it cooked out all flat and crunchy and lacey. Damn I already miss baked goods.

We did some hiking, some driving around to see random things like bizarre church signage and cool hardware stores.

This one sort of channels the 1988 Bobby McFerrin hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and that annoying “Got Milk?” ad campaign.

Many, many old tools. Particularly old saws and manual/hand drills. Three floors in an old barn of the stuff stacked all willy nilly. Plus a few randoms like the sheet music for the 80s hit “Ghostbusters” or a coat/gun rack made of the four upturned hoofs of a deer topped by a furry cranial cap and antlers.

(This. God.)

Being Maine and all, we drove to a fishing harbor and bought live lobsters from some lobster fishermen. These lobsters have big ol’ claws on them (prudently rubber-banded shut) unlike all the lobster I’ve ever had—the Pacific/Caribbean spiny lobster, which look pretty much the same but without claws; they also have really long antennae. The Maine variety is supposed to be superior in flavor. On the drive home we discussed the most humane way to kill them. It turns out there are many ways to kill a lobster but all of them are sort of grim, really. We ended up just dropping them in the boiling pot but only after Karen hypnotized them by rubbing the backs of their shells. I don’t understand the logic behind it but they stop wiggling and sort of go limp. I guess it’s something you just know when you live in Maine.

The lobsters were quite excellent; we extracted the meat and tossed it in a pan with butter, olive oil, salt, garlic, and a little parsley. We also had leftover chanterelles and miscellaneous mushrooms that Ilana made into a lovely ragout. As an appetizer, Kurt made toasts with Brie and this awesome chestnut preserve we picked up from a co-op in Belfast that had a warm and honey-like flavor. Another complicated and tasty dinner.

Another food thing that Maine does very well is the roadside ice cream place. Often in a stand-alone building with a front window and a large parking lot. There are some really good ones and they always seem to have about a zillion flavors. Another thing, observe portions before ordering because it turns out that ‘small’ is something of a misnomer. We actually saw a person once order the large and it came in this siamese-twin cone contraption in order for the mountain of ice cream to possibly fit. The look on the guy’s face as he was handed this bounty of dairy might have been described as “triumphant.” We were advised to order ‘mini’ or ‘kiddie’ or ‘tiny’ or whatever the local slang happened to be and that was plenty.

(Parting shot. We stopped here for sandwiches on our way to a hike on the coast. A lobster roll, by the way, is a toasted hot-dog bun thing with lobster tossed in mayo inside. They can be good but often are not.)

Now that we’re tourists in our own country, we did the Kentucky tourist thing and went bourbon tasting. I love wine tasting and expected something similar but with brick buildings; however, I forgot that we are in the land of the puritans and half the counties in this state are dry counties. That means you can’t buy alcohol in them. But the large distilleries can make it and they might give you a taste if you sign a lengthy release form and consent to giving a thumb print and DNA sample.

We first visited Buffalo Trace distillery, which was not in a dry county and therefore did not require us to do anything illegal.

Yup, brick buildings as expected. And inside, BARRELS OF BOURBON. Hot damn! In fact, the very air around us smells like bourbon.

We took a tour, which was for the most part interesting and very informative but started out with an incredibly awful infomercial video thing. The four basic themes were very understated: Free Roaming Buffalo (cue thundering herd footage; slow-mo); Visionary Mountainmen (amiable-looking mustachioed man in coon hat gazes off into the distant plains); Hard Working Pioneers (quaintly outfitted woman sort of bumbles around a large vat, presumably of water); Ghosts of Bourbon Past (slow-mo of ghostly man lovingly patting a bourbon keg and then walking off into the golden light). All of which equal Quality Handcrafted Bourbon. The film was narrated by the same guy who does movie trailers and they recapped the Four Basic Points no less than three times before the movie finally faded into a shining bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whisky, thank god.

Where the bourbon is aged. Depending upon where the barrel is in the warehouse, the bourbon varies in quality; there are ‘sweet spots’ in the warehouse that produce exceptional bourbon. Another interesting Bourbon Fact is that a significant portion of the alcohol in the barrel evaporates as it ages. So a nine-year bourbon has only 2/3 or 3/4 of the liquid left; after 20 years, only about a quarter of the liquid is left.

We finally got to taste a smidge of the stuff before a huge group of Shriners came along.

Shriners!!

They all had matching shirts. I don’t even know what a Shriner is.

We spent a number of days in Granada under the pretext of taking Spanish classes; however, Joshua lasted only one day and I held out three. Oh well. We did a lot of studying on our own though. We seem to not be able to find very good classes these days. Both of us are at the stage where we need to practice our fluency and just getting information across and most courses seem to only focus on grammar and vocabulary, which is great, but vocabulary certainly is something we can study on our own and learning complex grammar is just not helping me when I can’t even get the simple stuff out of my mouth without leveling a few city blocks.

In addition to not taking Spanish classes, we did a lot of walking around just to spite the dramatic heat. The town is a lovely colonial town built next to an incredibly large lake, from which a steady strong breeze generally blows. Unfortunately, the center of town is not next to the lake (not sure why) and several blocks of concrete and pavement ensure that the heart of the city is well insulated from any sort of refreshing breeze that might make it from the lake.

(These guys were hauling ginormous beef carcasses at the Mercado; Joshua was slyly trying to get a photo of the meat but this guy spotted us and decided to take control of the photography session.)

The first day and in fact nearly every day of our stay, we woke up to no electricity. This meant that the fan in the room stopped working and the room would heat up rapidly the moment the sun rose. In addition to the sweltering living quarters, the water ran on an electric pump so it too would stop working. So basically every morning we would come flying out of our room at around 7:15am panting, half dressed, and having to pee to no lights and no water. Someone always managed to get to that first flush in the communal toilet and so we were out on the street generally by 7:18am trying to hunt down a restaurant with the wherewithal to make coffee without electricity and running water in the bathroom. Kathy’s seemed to frequently fit the bill; they even put little candles in the bathrooms so you could see where you were throwing your paper towels, a huge bonus. Kathy’s has really good coffee and American-style fare in addition to the Nicaraguan breakfast (there’s only one: scrambled eggs, pinto gallo—which is rice and beans cooked together, and maybe some fried plantains). Kathy’s is also something of a hangout of the retired guy expat community, being itself owned and run by an expat man and his attractive young Nicaraguan wife.

We met a number of the expat crew during our stay in Granada, usually at Kathy’s. All of them were jovial men in their 60s and upward with young (like early twenties) Nica wives. They would all arrive and cluster around two or three extended tables ranting about the soccer game or the upcoming election or whatever and the wives would all group together and discuss various telenovela dramatics and the latest plot twists. The majority of them seemed to have come recently (within the last five years) from Costa Rica, where they retired initially, did a little speculating, possibly married a Costa Rican woman, but when the cost of living there skyrocketed and crime rates increased, they sold their properties and bought into the Nicaraguan market. A couple of the men we met owned properties that they were fixing up for sale to the foreign market. A strange scene really, but most of the people we met in Granada, tourists not excluded, were really bizarre people with their own trip going. One of the expats described his situation, “Why wouldn’t a guy like me move to Nicaragua? I built a big beautiful house where I have a cook and gardener and good security for pennies. I have a beautiful 22-year old wife. Here I live like a sultan.”

Granada was the first place we visited in Nicaragua and it was so very different from the places we had visited in Central America, especially El Salvador. First of all, we rarely if ever see any western tourist faces in El Salvador (except other boaters in the estuary) and in Granada, there are many tourists and a large community of expats and foreigners working for NGOs and whatnot. The majority of restaurants in the city center are ‘tourist restaurants’ run by expats, not Nicaraguans, and the locals seem to be scrambling to get in on the tourist market. We got a tense vibe from the place—something similar to what we felt when we visited Antigua and Chichicastananga in Guatamala twelve years ago (granted, Guatemala was still more insane even then than Nicaragua is now). I wonder if Granada might be heading in the same direction as Antigua.

Anyway, enough of why-Granada-is-weird; there is some good food to be had there. We found Nicaraguan food, on the whole, to be less than mind blowing. In fact, after a mere three weeks of travel in the area, I doubt I will be able to face pinto beans again for a long, long time. (Those of you who are aware of my dislike of pinto beans might be amused to discover that I had actually gotten used to and even enjoyed them on occasion in Mexico—and in El Salvador if well seasoned and served with cream and fried plantains.) By the end of this trip, one look at a plate of pinto gallo in the morning was enough to make my stomach turn. Nicaragua has once again killed the pinto bean for me.

Here is a list of our favorite things to eat in Granada.

* Buñuelas! Around 5pm every day, the Buñuela Lady mixes a big metal bowl of grated yucca and cheese, gets a small fire going with a wok of oil and drops spoonfuls of the batter to deep fry. She sets up on the sidewalk presumably in front of her house and is there until all the buñuelas are cooked and sold. She charges one cordoba (6 cents) per piece and gives them to you in a small baggie with an amber colored syrup over them. They are incredibly delicious with a golden crispy outside, a tart cheesy inside and the malty sweet syrup. Definitely my favorite street snack in Nicaragua. She can be found in the evenings on Calle el Comercio (also called Atravezada north of cross street Xalteva). Walk south past the central Mercado, past the Texaco station, over the small bridge; she’s another couple of houses on the right (right before you get to a somewhat wide paved street).

* Pithaya juice. A juice made from the pithaya fruit (looks like a southeast Asian dragon-fruit except intensely magenta inside) mixed with water, lime juice, and sugar. If you are lucky, you get a bunch of the seeds in the bottom which have a pleasing crunching texture. The flavor is great mostly because of the lime juice—the pithaya itself is not terribly intensely flavored—but the color of the stuff makes up for everything. You can get it almost everywhere (market, street juice vendors, Parque Central kiosks).

* Las Colinas. This is a restaurant that serves an excellent guapote (a fish from the lake). It is an enormous place with a well-watered sandy floor and about a thousand tables. The place had been recommended to us by a local girl who said if you want fish, this is the absolute best place in town to get it. We arrived a little before the standard dinner hour and felt a little awkward as we had the place to ourselves. We were also a little surprised that the prices were not as cheap as we were expecting (the small guapote ran around $6.50); however, the “small” guapote is actually rather large and you can order medium and large guapotes. (We probably would have ordered a medium to split had we know there would be so much food.) After we ordered and were drinking our beer, a number of people (all Nicaraguans) showed up and we didn’t feel so alone; almost all of them also ordered the guapote. As promised, the fish was great; the guapote is a fresh-water fish and has a different flavor than the fish we were used to eating. The typical way to prepare it seemed to be de-boned (even de-spined) with the head and tail still intact and then pan-fried with garlic and salt. The fish is crispy on the outside as well as the inside (lots of crispy fried surface area) with tender white flaky meat inside. Las Colinas served it with a tomato, onion, and pepper sauce over the top with French fries, rice, and salad. A ton of food, basically, which is why I might recommend splitting a medium fish if you intend to walk out of there under your own power afterwards. To get there: Follow the basic instructions above to get to the Buñuela Lady. When you get to the wide paved street (right past her house), turn left and walk around three blocks. You will go down a dip in the street and then up a small hill; the restaurant is on the corner, on the right hand side of the street and it is a large, unmistakable place.

* Pizza. For the first time ever traveling, I had a hankering for pizza. A hankering for pizza that spanned several days and we ended up trying three different pizza places in town.
Don Luca on Calle La Calzada: decent but not outstanding pizza; thin crust. My biggest complaint was that the mushrooms were out of a can. What the hell? Why would you bother with mushrooms if the only ones available were from a can? Obviously the few minutes pizza takes to cook were not enough to pierce the moist rubbery consistency or do anything for the flat beige color. The best part was the spicy oil they served along with the pizza. We used a lot of this.
Monna Liza on Calle La Calzada: quite good; again, the evil canned mushrooms but fewer and therefore, less offensive. The crust was great and again, the pizza was served with the spicy oil (not as spicy as Don Luca’s). We ordered negronis for dessert (a campari-gin-sweet vermouth cocktail), which were served over ice, not up (probably due to the heat), but were exciting nonetheless.
Telepizza on Calle El Arsenal: the cheapest of the three and extremely popular with the local Granadians (whereas Monna Liza and Don Luca only had a tourist or expat crowd). We were starving when we went here and the pizza, while less delicate than Monna Liza’s, was hearty and very good. The type of pizza and taste was comparable to any decent pizza place in the states, I would say.

(The blue Iglesia de San Francisco at night.)

* Kathy’s on the corner of Calle El Arsenal and across from the eggshell-blue Iglesia de San Francisco. Extremely pleasant porch seating across from the lovely blue cathedral with numerous fans above that keep the flies at bay. (Did I mention there is an incredible fly problem in Nicaragua? Unreal. I don’t know exactly what it is but El Salvador just does not have them like Nicaragua does. Eating anywhere without a strong fan directly on you requires constant vigilance with a napkin to defend your plate. Beers are often seen on tables with a napkin wrapped over the opening when not being sipped from.) As I mentioned earlier, the coffee is very good here and breakfasts are hearty, American-style. Another similar breakfast place is Ed’s Nica Buffet on Calle Estrada; I think I liked his coffee better than Kathy’s but the setting isn’t as pleasant.

* Vigarón. I enjoyed this dish but Joshua was not so hot on it. It’s worth mentioning because there are ladies with large baskets selling this all over the market; also, there are four kiosks at the corners of the central square and they all serve only vigarón (as well as fresh juices and soda pops). It is cooked yucca chunks with large curls of chicharón (fried pig skin—I’m not a fan but Joshua loves the stuff) topped with a piquant cabbage salad and served on a banana leaf. If you order it from one of the kiosks, you will get a fork to eat it with.

During our trip to Playa del Carmen for the wedding, we decided to visit Chichen-Itza, which is one of the major Mayan ruins we had not yet seen. We arrived in the evening to Piste, a small town about a kilometer from the ruins, and got a hotel for the evening; we wanted to get to the ruins first thing in the morning to avoid the teeming masses.

It was Saturday night in Piste and the town was decidedly NOT happening. The quasi-square area cleared out pretty much at dark and most of the restaurants were either empty or weird “Authentic Mayan Buffet” tourist places and empty. We had an inconsequential dinner at a random place after I chokingly refused the delicious-looking tamales being sold by the nice old couple in front of the main grocery. (I have a problem with corn and could not afford any digestive drama if I planned to be walking all over the ruins the next day.) Tamales are one of my absolute favorite foods and it makes me cry every time I have to pass up anything wrapped in a banana leaf that might be a tamale. Joshua refused the tamales out of solidarity.

The next morning we emerged bright and early (it was Sunday) hoping the weird bakery might be open and we could get some sort of pastry. We were not optimistic as it was early and I have found few Mexican bakeries that have anything I want to eat.

Then, we noticed a glowing golden light yonder across from the main grocery towards where the market is located. A food stand! (Hot damn!!) A food stand at seven in the morning and it was already surrounded by crowd of men bent over plates of food. The stand had a large vat of what turned out to be pork ‘cochinitas’ (pibil possibly?–we originally mistook it for carnitas, but were corrected by a gaggle of ravenous old ladies). People were ordering it in tacos, in tortas, or in dripping plastic bags to go (all the women were getting theirs to go); the cochinita guy would pick out a mixture of all the parts: ear, skin, fat, normal meat, and then scoop in some of the juice. We ordered tortas and specified that we wanted ‘pura carne’ or just meat. The guy was super friendly and laughed at our crazy tourist persnicketyness and put together two totally awesome tortas of pura carne with chopped pickled onions on top. I think this is the best torta I’ve had on the trip. Definitely the best pork I’ve ever had. It was tender and there weren’t any gelatinous gooey bits (I just hate that, although I know many consider this the best part); the pork has been stewed in a sort of red sauce, possibly with annatto, which seems to be a popular spice in the region. The roll was fresh and chewy (so many are flimsy and crumbly).

We stumbled off to Chichen-Itza for the day, utterly blissed out in a cochinita torta stupor. We were the first to arrive at the ruins and had the place to ourselves for all of fifteen minutes when two or three other people arrived. It is a fascinating ruin with many relief carvings in excellent shape but you are not allowed to climb up anything anymore, which is understandable but still a bummer. At the base of some of the major structures, the information plaque will detail tantalizing artifacts that mean this highly significant thing and how there is original paint still visible on that famous relief, etc., and you just have to imagine it. Plus the museum was closed for renovation. Sigh. The vast majority of the tourist population of all of the Yucatan arrived in a convoy of air-conditioned coaches around 10 to 11:00am-ish and the ruins turned into an obstacle course of German or Italian tour groups. We had to wade through the latte-wielding, Senor Frog’s t-shirt-sporting masses to get out. We enjoyed a hot but quiet walk back to town where we hopped a bus to Valladolid.

(Big-nosed gods.)

(Detail of some relief carvings.)

Starved, we deposited our backpacks at a totally reasonable and decent (albeit toiletseat-less) hotel called Lili’s. Lucky for us, there was another cochinita food stand right across the street from the hotel! We had our second cochinita torta of the day. It was delicious but not as delicious as the one we had for breakfast in Piste. We spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about in the heat taking in the sights of colonial Valladolid. Darkness found us in the zocalo where there were zillions of food stands with various snacky things and lo! There was another cochinita stand was set up at the edge of the square. I was still reeling a little from two major meals of cochinita and so I took only a delicate bite or two of Joshua’s third happy pork meal in one day.

(Not pork obviously, but a cute advertisement of a sweet little cow.)

And yes, as the title of this post might suggest, it was more cochinitas for us come morning and breakfast time. Joshua was just about to die of bliss, never having gotten away before with eating pork for every single meal two days running.

Me, I was ready for a salad.

Of course, there were a lot of consumables in this town and we found and consumed our share.

Our favorite was the woman (possibly named Teresa) who set up a stand to the right of the Havana grocery store across from the bus station. She made flour-tortilla tacos (soft small tortillas folded over; we might call them burritos but they were called tacos) using stewed chicken, some sort of marinated cabbage, and hot sauce and they were great. She is there daily but only in the mornings and there typically was a crowd. Her tacos are 50 cents Belize apiece (that’s 25 cents US); three of them makes an excellent breakfast.

Our second favorite was the night burrito lady in the green stand in the middle of town on the main street. She was on the same side of the street and about two or three doors down to the left from the “Garden Shop” mini-market (which is across the street from the big hardware store). She is closed up during the day but opens at night and you can barely see in her window due to the massive refrigerator that hogs all the space. She also makes burritos and hers are $2 Belize apiece (you could eat two maybe). Then you can get some beer at the Garden Shop and eat a nice picnic dinner at the beachfront park down the street. Note that there is a prominent green food stand on the corner directly across the street from the hardware store advertising tacos and burritos and while she is open pretty much all day, her burritos are not as good as either Teresa’s or the other green stall.

Incidentally, if you are self-catering, the Garden Shop sells shilling (25-cent) bags of frozen water, which you can bash up for iced drinks.

Many restaurants and bars also had excellent hand-painted signs.

We serves breakfast! We were told that the place used to be called Burger King until the owner received a cease and desist notice in the mail from Burger King â„¢. He has diner style food and makes his own ice cream (and has sour sop flavor!). The conch soup came recommended but Joshua was not too into it (I thought it was all right).

King Burger had a series of groovy menu signs.

That meat pie illustration is super awesome.

New Place, Old Sign.

This was outside one of the bars in town. (You can view a larger photo by clicking the image.)

We didn’t actually go to this bar but we did go to a place called “Bleachers” (bleaching means, apparently, getting wasted). They are just up the street from the bridge in the center of town and they make their own bitters. Bitter drinks seem to be popular in Belize and theirs is a gnarly concoction that is scooped out of a five-gallon bucket into small plastic cups; you order it by $1, $2, $3, etc. amounts. We ordered $1 bitters and beers (you typically need a beer chaser if you drink this stuff). I kind of liked it but then I’m all over bitter things generally. (Brad—it tasted sort of like the un-refined version of your absinthe, but in a more drinkable way. I *suspect* Shanti would not like it..)

Seaweed drink is a gelatinous drink made of seaweed obviously, and flavored with a little cinnamon, nutmeg, coconut milk, and perhaps a tiny bit of rum. The one we tried was actually off the main square in Orange Walk Town and was served in recycled Guiness beer bottles.

BOOZE: Beer by the way is Belikan Belize and it’s quite good in my opinion (after Mexican and other Central American fare). They have one bottle and you can get both regular or stout (different bottlecaps to tell which one). There is also a light version but honestly, who drinks light beer? Guiness is also widely available but it is made either in Belize or possibly Jamaica and is probably a little different than the Irish version most are familiar with.

You can also get Campari (they call it Bitters) in Belize; it is made in Jamaica, is wonderfully cheap (~$7 US per bottle), and tastes almost exactly like the Italian version. The color is only a little bit off, maybe they don’t use carmine bugs to dye it the beautiful red they do in Italy.

Belize makes several different “wines,” such as ginger wine, cashew wine, blackberry wine, etc. We tried the ginger wine (there are two brands that appear to be widely available: Fandango and some other one; the other one is better). It’s pretty good as is (I recommend chilled), intensely gingery but strong and very sweet and it is much better, in fact VERY much better, if served over ice with a splash of soda water. Mmm. We were intensely curious about the cashew wine but never tried this due to the elaborate cautions we received by every single Belizian we mentioned cashew wine to. “That stuff is dangerous mon.” “Your grandma drink that stuff, she go dancing in the street naked!” “You drink one bottle of that stuff and you are drunk for three days. So I guess it’s economical. Of course you don’t remember any of it!” So we stayed away from the cashew wine; we got enough shit from people for drinking the ginger wine.

MISCELLANEOUS: Marie Sharp’s Hot Sauce!! Almost my favorite thing ever. I threw a colossal fit when Joshua proposed a return to El Salvador via Mexico/Guatemala and not via Belize (where I could stock up). We returned via Belize and I am the proud owner of about fifty gerjillion bottles of hot sauce. She makes the traditional carrot orange habanero sauce (in mild, hot, fiery hot, and novelty—has capsum oil in it and a warning label about feeding it to the elderly). She also makes an orange/habanero and a grapefruit/habanero version and various jellies and chutneys. We’ve only tried the habanero jelly so far because the jar smashed in transit but I salvaged the majority by slicing the glassy bits off the outside (ala moldy cheese). It’s pretty good I think; it has very few ingredients but you can taste each one but the habanero heat is very mild. I’ll report back later on the Green Mango Chutney, which must be just awesome.

Fresh juices: At most of the grocery stores (there are two big ones near the main bridge and the Havana market across from the bus station) you can buy fresh juice in squarish plastic bottles (like what Odwalla comes in). The grapefruit in particular is very good.

Coffee: None. Bad, vile. Drink coke.