One of our favorite taco stands (asada and adobada, which is the marinated pork).

Tacos in the making!

This guy makes what looks like salsa soup (hot); we haven’t tried it yet because every time we get to him, we’re already stuffed with tacos. We’ll get to it…

The previous two photos are of a very elaborate and popular stand that has very good fish tacos. You pay one guy who gives you a tiny bit of paper with your order written down, then you give that to the guy at the grill who will always present your place with the careful pronunciation: “feesh tacos.” Another woman mans the liquados and washes the dishes.

January 6th was Dia de los Reyes (day of the kings), which is a Catholic holiday celebrating when the three kings arrived to the baby jesus and gave him presents. Kids here open their presents (you know, from the kings) at this point and then everyone celebrates with a fruitcake, or ‘Rosca.’ Every bakery in town is loaded down with these ring-shaped fruit cakes, which represent the crowns of the kings, and something dangerous—possibly involving knives, and then there is a baby jesus inside the fruitcake! A Christmas miracle! (Um, if I understood correctly).

Pussy cakes! Actually, they are our favorite bakery treat aside from the palmeras; they are cheesecakes baked into a slightly obscene shape.

One the way back from CCC we stopped at a recommended liquor store on Allende and Independencia. It turns out we’d been there before and it was right across the street from our favorite tortillaria and a strange/cool fishing store where I bought a rapala (rapala = 1 sierra). Cheyenne is yelling over my shoulder “stay on target! Quinar.” So… to quinine. Said liquor store had corn-free tonic. Described on the bottle as “agua quinada,” which we take to mean “quinined water,” and in turn means that the verb must be quinar: to quinine. Ultimately, it means I had to dig into deep storage for the remaining bottle of Sapphire.

We’re back in La Paz! Home of the La Paz Cruisers Net, a radio “info” hour, with lost and found, who’s coming and going, weather, tides, stuff for sale/trade, etc. Every so often the net gets taken over by the chatty mcchattersons and degenerates into gossip or specific snarking about this or that and we of course never miss it if we can help it. This morning was dominated by the epic saga of Raoul’s sore throat. Blow by blow details of the progression of this extremely rare and unique variety of strep throat, heretofore named Streptococcus Raullius, which doesn’t respond to any normal antibiotic, nor does it respond to any run-of-the-mill doctoring. No no. Raullius requires special $80 (US!) antibiotics (did he mention they must be very very strong and not any normal antibiotics?), which may be obtained by only one very special doctor in La Paz (additional personal anecdotes and the doctor’s name, spelling of name, and telephone number is now given about seventeenthousand times for everyone who didn’t quite get it the first time; this takes an additional fifteen minutes) who was thankfully astute enough to identify the important nature of this illness. Betsy from Qayaq (a doctor, unfortunately for her this morning) I knew must be pacing up and down the walls of her boat near the start of the antibiotic “advice” and it took about 20 minutes for her tortured voice to come on offering clarification on a few points.

Now we’ve degenerated to, “Is today… Wednesday? Or Thursday?” Luckily the highly contagious Raoul knows that it is Wednesday (because he knows he does the radio hosting on Wednesdays). I would make fun of the question, “Is sweetened milk the same as evaporated milk,” if damned if I didn’t ask the very same question a week or so ago when sifting through all our weird cans left over from the apartment departure and which we ended up bringing along.

Anyway, we’ll be around these parts for the next couple of days continuing our ice cream flavor research at La Fuente and finishing up our sweep of taco stands across town. Details will follow.