First Day

This journal is going to be hard to keep up with. As complaints go, its a pretty good one, "We are doing too much stuff, I don't have time to stop and write!".

 First day for lunch we "kept it simple"since I had really only just gotten of the plane a few hours prior. We walked down the street to a place that Gabe and his mother frequent. Casa De Praia. "The beach house". It was very cool open deck, chairs under the awning, and really no windows or doors to be closed in the place. We started with fresh coconut water!

Their primary fare? Seafood and smoothies. I ordered fried flounder (took some time to figure out the translation for that one) filets with butter, mushrooms, and capers. It came with two sides, fried rice with bananas and cashews, and "mashed" hmm..potato? If you've been to a Peruvian chicken place they server Yucca fries. It is *That* potato, except that is also the same thing as tapioca. Here the root itself is called manioca. Mashed really was more "pureed". Appetizers for the table were fried calamari and manioca fries. Of course, I also got fresh coconut water.

The fish was really good. Cooked just right, capers really got the mushrooms going. The rice was pleasant, i really couldn't taste much of banana, but then they have like 10 different varieties of banana so who's to say? The manioca was different, a bit more like a squash puree it was pretty good. I of course sampled other people's foods. Something that is fairly common, its not rude to try something off of someone else's plate, you don't even really need to ask (so I'm told). I grabbed pictures of it all, the pasta that Stella had was quite good.

For dessert (even though I protested I didn't have room), was a cup of a very dense chocolate fudge kind of pudding. Apparently pretty common, I actually like the "messy" presentation, thought that the white stuff might have been marshmallow, which would have made for an interesting take on a s'more. It turned out to be a light whipped cream, which i was glad for, since after a few bites I needed it to help lighten the ever so think and rich chocolate. I finished the desert, glad to have had it, it was really quite good (and apparently a common dessert item).

 Mel had a frozen passion fruit , which was actually quite good. Very tart, as long as you don't mind the seeds. Served in a frozen passion fruit rind "cup". It was really quite tasty. Passion fruit, I'll miss you.

This is the kind of place that I'd go to all the time if I could in the U.S. this kind of casual seafood fair just isn't the norm though.