Postponed

My trip to Brazil has been postponed until tomorrow morning, so it will really be more of a day trip. With the extra time I had today, I decided to change my money in preparation for tomorrow's trip. The euro is strong against the real, so I should have plenty of money.

Then I wen hunting for bouyon wara (which I previously talked about in this post). To save you a bit of a trip, bouyon wara is THE national dish of French Guiana, eaten mainly around Easter and Pentecost. Its base is a paste of the wara, a fruit from the buba palm tree, a fruit whose flesh is quite fibrous and not that great to eat raw, though the flavor is delicious. The fruit is then cooked into a paste which forms the base of the dish, and to it is added pork, beef, chicken, and shrimp, as well as lots of spices (though shockingly it isn't spicy hot). To make a good bouyon wara (bouillon d'awara in French), you really have to start on Friday and keep cooking until Sunday. In the end it should be soft, slightly salty, with the meat being the consistency of brisket or pulled pork. After several days of searching for it, I finally found it at the market (though they hadn't been selling it the other times I'd looked). The price: 20€ for one kilo. I bought two. Why spend so much on one meal? Well besides being delicious, 20€ is actually a bargain for what it costs to make it at home. Assuming you don't want to spend a day trying to make the wara paste, you can buy a bottle of the paste for 15€ (the raw fruits to make the paste would cost probably about 5€, and then the oil would probably cost another 5). Then there's the cost of all the meat. Recipes typically call for several pounds of meat, because when you cook this, you really don't bother cooking for one. So actually, 20€ for a meal that would have cost me way more was a great bargain. I bought one kilo for myself, and one for Alex, who will be the only one home with me tomorrow night. He's done my interviews for free, so this is my way of repaying him.

And the rest of the day was spent working on my interviews and on my introduction to linguistics class that I'll be teaching this summer.

Finally here's a picture of me. I know I haven't had many pictures of myself up this time around, so in response to all the clamoring, here you go.