Headed Home - - or - - Let`s Wind this Thing Up!
July 20th, we celebrated Colombian Independence Day with street fairs and traffic jams. They close down one or two lanes each way on what passes for freeways, every Sunday morning in Cali. The entire city turns out, and today especially, everyone and their duck was out there, pedaling and paddling away. The noon meal's delicious roast chicken and rice, followed by an evening meal of delicious roasted chicken and rice from a different place, brought home a couple of interesting facts. One, it's time to go home. Everything is beginning to taste like chicken and rice. Two, we're running out of money. ...and three, I miss my favorite breakfast of scrambled eggs and Mexican-style chorizo on a yellow corn tortilla.
Staying at our daughter's new mother-in-law's house in the southern part of Cali, we enjoy the sounds of the neighborhood. Here comes the local bread vendor, singing "Pan de Oro!" at, not the top of his lungs, but in a voice that carries. The watchman comes by on his "moto," a small thing that, if required to chase the bad guys away, might start them laughing instead of running. Down the street, a man is washing his "escolar" bus, a privately-owned 12 passenger model school bus that he drives for a fee. Along the northern perimeter of the neighborhood, there is a shopping center with an "LA-14" mega-store, the Colombian version of "WallyWorld," plus ten or fifteen shops for getting your hair done or for buying chicken meals. Malls attract teens on "motos," just like pools of stagnant water attract mosquitoes, except that the buzz is louder.
In the other direction, a few cows graze while construction workers slowly, almost painfully, build more houses for the subdivision. Up the street at the neighborhood swim club, kids are laughing, playing, splashing. Everyone you pass on the street offers a friendly "buen... dia..." with its last syllables carefully clipped. Eyes follow you. I feel secure in that. The neighborhood is a living, breathing, seeing organism, and on its next breath outward, I, a foreign object, will be gone.
- - -
What unexpected luck- - the women have decided to go shopping, our last evening in Cali. Yeah, bad news for the bank account, but hey! ...what price freedom? Off my leash at last, I grab a cold "Poker" beer from the fridge, and begin to plot my escape route. Half an hour later and three blocks away (sigh), I walk up to the hot dog stand at the mall and order a "perro caliente combo," mall food it its finest, a hot dog with fries and the works, and a local soda. They serve 'em with ketchup, a little mustard, onion, a little sweet relish, and slaw with a sweet mayo-based lubricant. ...not bad, washed down with a neon-colored creme soda. So much for low-budget, last-minute sausage testing.
Next, I checked out the aforementioned LA-14 megastore. The bakery department yielded some goodies which I packed back to the house. There was a meat empanada and a tuna empanada, nuked together for 22 seconds, which were pretty good. (They would have been better in the toaster oven.) Next was one of the greatest of many great contributions that the French have made to society, the butter croissant. We're talking the real thing here, rolled thin, buttered cold, folded, repeated about a thousand times. ...light, flavorful, completely unlike those nasty yeast-risen imitations produced back in the U. S. of A. These things are even better than Ross Hill's baking creations, if you can believe that.
I struggled with my last choice. I have been known to hike several kilometers, no, miles, through French neighborhoods in search of the perfect croissant-au-chocolat. Trouble is, just about anything that you can bake into a croissant (Carolina barbecue excepted) tastes wonderful on a croissant. I opted for a cheese croissant and the cheese, a sort of buttery, semi soft local cheese, complimented the bread perfectly. Not to sound like some cheesy food columnist, though, I rate it "purdy dang good" instead of the usual meaningless "bold, yet understated" food snob drivel. Its only fault was that I didn't buy a couple more.
For dessert... Well, I was completely full at that point. I guess I'll have another beer and, when the women get back and ask what I had for dinner, I'll smile and say "Oh, not much." It's not lying, is it, if Beloved Spouse, who is gluten intolerant, can't eat it, right?
Of course, right!
(And whew! ...what a sentence!)
We finally were able to fly out, three days late, for an extra five hundred bucks. With that kind of fee, and with charging extra for luggage, how in the world the airlines all go bankrupt is beyond me. Having missed our connection by three days, we rented a car and drove northward through bumper-to-bumper traffic and rain deluges, 700 miles, from Miami to North Carolina. There was a pleasant overnight stay in a dump in Saint Augustine, where Beloved Spouse and I relived a visit that we`d had forty five years earlier during my brief but brilliant two year military career. The fish was good, but there was no rice, no fruit, no...
- Aw, phooey. We`re back. It`s over.
So, in conclusion... Uh... Where did we start this thing? Oh, yeah- - consider vacationing in Colombia. Make friends who are from there, beforehand, and you can easily quadruple the experience. These days, Colombia is once again a nice place to visit. It's safe and relatively inexpensive, the people are friendly, and the food is excellent. ...especially
(if you dare) when you tell 'em that el Ducko sent you. (The response will be predictable: "Huh?")
...and when you order, don't forget the rice.
- This ends the multi-part epic narrative of el Ducko`s adventures in Colombia. Be sure to watch for the epic motion picture starring ....Dah ta duh Daaah!.... el Ducko, soon to be featured at a theater near you.
The usual fine print applies. Void where prohibited by law. (...or good taste.)