2/12/2012 - Bachin' it again

Well, Lulu took off to the airport about 11:00 this morning. She's headed to Iowa City where she'll spend 2 weeks visiting her mom as well as her brother and his wife. Although she's been assured that it's been an uncommonly mild winter in Iowa, I'm sure she'll be in for a shock to her system. The first shock came before she even left the boat when she had to put on *gasp* shoes and socks!!!! But, at least she got a pretty good flight. Mazatlán to Cedar Rapids, Iowa with a stop in Houston. Total flying time is only about 5-1/2 hours and she has an hour or so layover in Houston. Not bad. The flights from La Paz to Iowa via Los Angeles often take over 24 hours altogether, including layovers. Yuck!

My first official act as a temporary bachelor, or, in sailor parlance, a single-hander, was to take the bus to the produce stand to get some fresh stuff. While there, I stopped next door at the roast chicken place and got a chicken and sides. I should have gotten a photo so you could see what a production this is. There are 3 wood-fired grills running and they are piled with beautiful butterflied grilled chickens. A whole chicken, hacked up into serving pieces, a stack of corn tortillas, a baggie of really good salsa, a baggie of shredded lettuce, and another baggie of Mexican rice cost $80 pesos (just over $6.00 US). So, here's my bounty:

Total cost for all of this: $153 pesos or about $11.77 (US). Compare this to our going away dinner yesterday. We went to a sort of fancy restaurant near here. We'd heard good things about it and the food was, in fact, pretty good. However, we each had a bowl of tortilla soup and then split a Vietnamese beef roll. We also had 2 beers each. Our dinner, light as it was, cost $300 plus tip. I spent half that on today's haul. The longer we're in Mexico and the more places we eat, the less interested we are in the tourist places. That's not to say that we won't go back to Fat Fish for ribs again, but that's because the ribs and the price are great. But I think we'll skip Pancho's and Munchkin's and the rest of the places in the Gold Zone. We're much more enamored of the little places that cater to the locals more than to tourists.

So, dinner tonight: chicken tacos (for one) at home.