Armadillo...It's whats for lunch and other random happenings

Thus far most of the blog has been about the work that we have been doing down here.  Since we have a few down days, it is a good opportunity to put some random happenings or other interesting tidbits up on the interwebs.

Let's start with today.  Being Sunday, we went to church this morning.  For those of you who haven't been to the Kairos Familia church, it involves a lot of good music, plenty of hugging (not something I like to do), and is very much a small community of people who care about and help each other out.  It is tradition with Ken that the boys get to go out for lunch after church each week.  Usually it is one of the many chicken restaurants (spoiler alert: there will be a post solely on the chicken restaurant names in the future), but since we are guests, we decided to go to Las Cabanas (anybody know how to put the squiggly line over the n in that word?).  Las Cabanas are basically thatched roof huts down by the river who all make traditional Bolivian cuisine and is one of the places to get the more distinctive dishes.  If you followed our first trip, this is the place we ate where the dog wandered in and urinated on the chair.

We chose a hut and basically ordered about half the menu because Ken let the boys order plus a couple of items that the Anderson crew really wanted, and then we waited while a band started playing loud horn and drum music and random people wandered by trying to sell us everything from chewing gum to inflatable cartoon balloons to sunglasses.  The food showed up after a few minutes and we had plates of pique macho (beef with hot dogs, french fries, sauce, boiled eggs and mayonnaise), roasted pork, a roasted duck and tatu.  Tatu translated to English is armadillo, and its something I have been waiting to taste for quite some time.  Gotta say, it was the best dish of the day and was a huge hit with the kids.  I made the pics a little extra large so you can see all the delicious detail in these ones.

After lunch, we went down to the plaza downtown where they have a Sunday market. Logan picked up a small ring and Melody got a lovely linen shirt with very finely detailed crocheted accents.  The shirt is very typical of the Santa Cruz area and was made by a nice older lady.  I almost purchased a leather satchel for work, but we were not able to negotiate a price I was happy with, so that will have to wait.  The other interesting things were the cayman skin belts with the heads as the buckle.

We decided to chill out a bit in the plaza after the market, so we got some bird feed and fed the pigeons and when Lukas ran out of feed, he tried to catch them but managed to get a bit scared when one flew at him.  Then we just had to have a picture taken with the scariest Santa Claus we have had the pleasure to meet.

That was about it for today, so here are a few other little items from our trip so far.  First off, Melody has a hatred for spiders, and we have had a couple of run ins since we got here.  The first was at Ken's house and was with the spider in the picture below.  The second was with a very similar spider who ran from under our bed into the dirty clothes pile and made her jump up on the bed and let me know in no uncertain terms that there was a spider that needed my attention.  We have also seen a number of other large insects along the way as well such as moths and large ants.

And to cap it off, here are some pictures of cute kids we have dealt with along the way.