20K and a Year Away

We made some new friends this week. Monday afternoon, we got a taxi to my friend Pedro’s aunt’s house. A little background. I knew Pedro when I lived here in 1987 and 1988. When I came back to visit in January 2020, I made contact with him. His mom still lives in the house across the street from the house I had lived in. I went to their house and had breakfast with his mom – she gave me a cooking lesson for patacones (fried green plantain) and fried yuca. It had been 32 years since we had spoken. It was so fantastic to see him and his mom and learn all about what he had been doing for the last 30 years. It is also really nice to reconnect with someone from my teen years. I don’t really know many people not related to me that I knew when I was a kid – a by-product of moving around a lot.

Pedro’s mom’s sister, Sra. Petra, lives just outside of Santa Fe, our current location. She is over 80 years old, had 11 children, and lives in the same house on the same property where her mother was raised. A few of her children still live here with her, but most of them have moved to larger, urban areas with more work opportunities to raise their own families. They all come back to visit and reconnect with the area. The house they have is made up of the area her mother had raised her and her sisters in, a large covered porch, a larger area they had built to raise their own family, and several outbuildings for animal and storage needs. The property is very big and has bananas, plantains, coconuts, oranges, mandarines, grapefruit, yuca, limas, coffee, and they built a pond for fish. They had chickens everywhere, cats, dogs, and little baby chicks.

We got there around 2 and they had rice with chicken waiting for us. We said hello to all her kids, grandkids, and husband who were there to see us. We met one of her granddaughters who is the same age as Axel, in the hopes of getting a conversation class going. No luck! HA! They sat us at the table to eat and then just watched us eat. Axel was the best-mannered child. He ate almost all of the food even though he didn’t really like parts of it. He is trying so many new things, but there are some old things that he just can’t make the leap. When we were done with the rice, she made me a very good cup of coffee. Man, I love good coffee.

After we finished the coffee, Sra. Petra gave us a tour of the property. We saw all the fruit growing and wound our way down to a pond one of her sons had dug that is fed by an underwater source. They filled the pond with fish for eating. She had brought a bag of fish food and threw a few handfuls in so we could see them all. There were a ton of fish! Some of them were huge! Axel wanted to try to go fishing for one. We might get a chance to do that next week.

It was a really nice visit. She sent us home with a bag of ripe bananas, oranges, and a fruit she called lima that is not a lime that we recognize from the store. She did ask us to return the bag, it was a really nice one. We told her we would and then got in the taxi and headed back to the hotel.

We shared the bananas with José, the hotel owner, and Katherine, the restaurant owner. I also had Katherine make a flan for us to give Sra. Petra for her family for Christmas Eve when several of her kids and their families were coming to celebrate. We also got a big Christmas bread they are selling in all of the stores and put it in the bag to return.

We took the flan up to her house today, by taxi, of course, with the fancy bread, and wished them all a very Merry Christmas. We have another visit planned for next week. I will call Sra. Petra on Sunday to get a list of ingredients we will need for chicken and rice. We will head back to their house for an afternoon next week and they will teach us how to make the chicken and rice we had at their house – minus the stuff Axel still doesn’t like.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We will have breakfast and lunch at the restaurant here at the hotel, then we are going to go eat at Katherine’s house with her family. It is going to be a very nice evening. On Saturday, we will have a call with our family. It will be a very different Christmas, but talking with them will be very nice because they are our best friends.