Import

Tonight I made chilaquiles. We also, after months of searching, found a new air filter for our car. Big news all around today. We clearly delight in the seemingly small things around here.

We can’t get tomatillos here, but a dear colleague went on TDY to Mexico for a month and brought me some canned (well, actually they were in a box) ones. They worked smashingly! Chilaquiles used to be a quick easy, tasty breakfast-for-dinner meal I would make relatively frequently back home. Here it is the stuff of dreams. Clearly, air filters for a 2005 Toyota are as well.

We have sporadically searched for a new air filter here for the past couple of months. I will make every effort to go to all future posts with things like air filters. It’s the challenge of living in a place where everything appears to be inefficiently imported.

When we first got here I used to go on these shopping scavenger hunts convinced if I just looked harder a favorite, much-needed cooking item would pop up. Now I have succumbed to the “si Dios quierre” attitude. I don’t know where such and such is and, well, they probably don’t have it anyway. One time, I kid you not, I went to buy new bras (sorry too much info, I’m sure) and all they had at Jumbo (our Super Wal-Mart like store) was hundreds and hundreds, rows and rows, hangers and hangers of size 32B.

I say all this out of love. It can be crazy, but you get used to it. And, I have it on good authority that some places are crazier. Here’s my new favorite statistic that I love to tell people when they say, “Madagascar?! That will be interesting,” The per capita GDP for the United States is $47,400 (which would buy you 1,436 twenty-pound bags of rice on Amazon). For the Dominican Republic it’s $8,600 (also known as 260 twenty-pound bags of rice). For Madagascar it’s $1000 (30, yes three zero, twenty-pound bags of rice). Of course, there’s this too.