El Dorado Ranch #2

Here it is later, and Bickie and I have just returned from our latest adventure. I call it, finding the grocery store in a Mexican town where no one speaks English and we don’t speak Spanish. We went to San Felipe, seeking groceries, mixers, and beer. However after wandering around the scarier sections of town, we decided it was time to try and ask someone. First try was at an auto parts store, we thought was a grocery store. We asked the guys in front but no one spoke English. Then I came up with the bright idea of asking for pollo (which I think is Spanish for chicken). The one guy seemed to understand and pointed back toward town and indicated 4 blocks. Well that didn’t work, so we went into one of the ubiquitous PEMEX gas stations that seem to be on every corner. Bickie had an uproarious time doing Spanish charades with the attendants. They seemed to understand food, and pointed to the various food stands around. But then Bickie said Me Casa and made cooking motions with her hands. That did it. The one fellow understood, and made a drawing of a D and J in the palm of his hand. He then pointed up the street and made motions like 1 cross road. Low and behold we found the D and J Market, just up the street. Problem solved, well not exactly. Food is pretty much food everywhere, and with the exchange rate being approximately 10.5 pesos to the dollar, something that cost 23.00 was a little less than $2.30. Only problem was, all the signs for produce and meat were in Spanish, and everything was sold by the Kilo instead of Pound. Luckily I remembered my metric stuff and realized a kilo is about 2.2 pounds. However, that didn’t help me with the fact that I had no idea what the Spanish word for Onion, Potato, or Asparagus was. So all the signs said such and such was 11.56 per kilo but I had no idea what sign went with what. Finally Vickie in her infinite wisdom said, why don’t you just get what you want and quit worrying about how much a pound it is. Turns out, things were pretty cheap when we finally got to pay for it all, but it was quite a challenge figuring out what was what to buy it. So here we sit with something that looks like Squirt or Fresca, in a 2 liter bottle, that shows this cool diagram of how rain turns into mineral water on the side, and a picture of some non descript citrus fruit on the front. The label reads something like Agua Mineral de Manantial then Nuevo then the name Penafiel followed by sabor, Toronja. Hopefully one of my more bilingual friends will be able to translate this for me when I get home. One more cool thing. Turns out that at low tide, which is currently in the morning and late afternoon, you can walk miles out on the exposed sand, and dig up something called butter clams. Bickie said she is going to harvest our hor de orves for dinner one night.
More later,
Wes and Bickie