La comida

I didn't have time to write, but here's what I wrote to mom about the food here:

The food is a lot of chicken, a lot of rice, and very little flavor.  While there are a few dishes that I like a lot, such as sopa de maní (peanut soup), the truth is that I don´t like the food very much because it is pretty bland and frequently makes me sick.  We eat lunch every day with the same family and every once in a while, we eat lunch or dinner with another family, but we usually don´t eat dinner (lunch is the big meal of the day here). I have grown to like salsa more and am eating with an increasing level of spiciness in my food.  They don´t eat much salsa here, but it is pretty much the only condiment that is easy to find and I like to eat.

There is pizza here, but it is of a very low quality and comes with little or no sauce.  In Santa Cruz, there is a pizzeria owned and run by an American that´s pretty good.  It´s about the quality of 5 Buck Pizza, but it's quite expensive and the missionaries only eat there for special occasions.

Now that I am out of santa Cruz, it is also impossible to find things such as barbeque sauce and peanut butter, but there is an awesome Agentinian hostess-like pastry called game that only costs $0.28.

My favorite Bolivian food is actually a juice-box like juice that comes in a 150 mL sack.  It´s called pilfrut and is like a watered-down Gogurt.  It´s delicious, costs only $0.07 and is especially awesome on a hot, sunny day (pretty much every day here).

I have a personal goal to eat every single thing that someone puts in front of me (that isn't against the mission rules or the Word of Wisdom) throughoutt the whole 2 years of my mission.  Other than the 5 times that I have thrown up due do dengue or stomach infections, I have left every single plate clean of food and even cleaned my companion´s plate a couple of times.  I am actually quite proud of that feat, because as you well know, I was a very picky eater before.  I have also discovered (which probably won´t surprise you) that some of the things that I would never eat before, such as bananas actually taste pretty good.  Tomatoes, however are still nasty, but I eat them anyway now.

Elder Casdorph