brain crabs

So, we’ve uploaded some more photos to the gallery if you care to check them out.
Most of the photos are from the Tuesday Market. It’s a combination yard sale, scratch and dent, Mexican soul-food extravaganza, and black market that takes up about an acre or two out near the aptly named Gigante shopping mall. I snapped a few photos covertly because I quickly realized that, for whatever reason, the vendors don’t really like having their photos taken. Maybe it’s because the car stereos that they’re selling are fresh from the cars. But strangely enough, despite the obvious appearance of illegality (like the guy with a pile of blank disks and a computer who’s selling pirated albums to customers) the heavily armed police who mill about the market do very little to deter the distribution of obviously bootlegged media and clothing. As I’ve mentioned before, you can get ANYTHING at the Tuesday Market. It’s a wild time. It’s easy to get lost in the dense maze of stalls, all covered by multi-colored plastic tarps. I’m sure we’ll take several trips back there so I’ll try to take even more photos the next time.

Today, we had our last day of Spanish tutoring before we start in with a class on Tuesday. Our teacher, Cecilia, was quite a character although I’m not so sure she’s aware of it. Despite being a language teacher, her English wasn’t so hot and we had a difficult time asking her complicated questions about the lessons. In addition, she’d do things like, we’d be going over how to describe nationalities (Yo soy de los Estados Unidos. Soy Americano, etc) and, as a way of prompting us to say something like, “El es de Japon,” (“He’s from Japan”) she’d pull at the corners of her eyes and make them all squinty. We sort of blanched at that, recognizing that motion as the ubiquitous children’s gesture for mocking Asians. But she did drop a totally priceless gem on us. During our first week, she made a hilarious distinction. Well, maybe the distinction is ultimately more useful than hilarious, but the way she put it to us was off the fucking charts!

So, she says to us, “When it’s hot out, you can say, ‘Esta caliente.’ And when you’re hot, you can say, ‘Tengo calor.’ But never say ‘Estoy caliente’ because that means you want the sexo.

Aside from a few hiccups like that one, the classes went really well. The downside is that when our classes for the whole month of May start next week, there won’t be enough enrolled students to necessitate an afternoon class so we’ll have to be up for the 9am class. That’s not so bad except for that fact that it looks like we’ll have to start back at the beginning of the book that we’ve almost completed in the two weeks of tutoring. And even if the class can cover the same ground we did in two weeks, that’s still HALF THE GODDAMN CLASS of review. And it’s not like the material isn’t fresh in our fucking heads, either. I kind of wish I had this information before I made a completely non-fucking-refundable payment on the classes.
Poo.

But on another note: Churros.
We’ve recently discovered this heart-stoppingly fantastic Mexican delicacy. I guess delicacy is the wrong word because there’s nothing delicate about these bastards. They’re essentially deep-fried, sugar coated, crispy sticks of corn meal. Here’s a picture:

As you can tell by the way they’re rendering this brown paper bag soggy and transparent, their less-than-subtle flavor is utterly magnificent.
You can buy these delicious sons-of-bitches for less than fifty cents per greasy bag of six. Here’s another picture:

Mmmm… Imagine if funnel cake could do that thing that dying stars do and get ultra dense and consolidated. That’s kind of how churros are. If you took a thousand funnel cakes and turned them into one single gravity vortex of oil, sugar, and fantastic taste, they’d transcend their funnel cake existence and become the ultradense Churro about which physicists would theorize for decades.

And being a physicist myself, I decided to do a little experiment. I called that experiment, “I’ll save a couple in a ziplock bag so I can have them with my coffee in the morning.” I took as a given that anything, when sealed in a ziplock bag, would last overnight and I think that’s a pretty good assumption given the miraculous previous performance of ziplock bags. I mean, wouldn’t you trust just about anything to a ziplock bag? I would. And I did. I put the churros in the plastic bag and left them on the counter. I didn’t put them in the fridge because, being a physicist and not a dummy, I knew that the sweet grease that was already making both the paper bag and my very hands slick and transparent would coagulate and become utterly inedible and repellant as soon as it was chilled below room temperature. So, I left the churros on the counter, in the ziplock bag. I put their original paper bag in there as well, just so they’d feel at home. I went to bed and dreamed coronary dreams about sweet churros. When I woke up in the morning, I saw an amazing sight. The churros had rendered the paper bag entirely transparent! Here’s a picture:

I’ve never even seen fish and chips do that! I mean, that’s what you expect from mopping off your greasy pizza with a thin little napkin, not from leaving your fried dough in a paper bag! Needless to say, I was amazed and excited as I popped those bad boys in the microwave (sans paper bag, of course). Thirty seconds later, the tasty smell of churros and coffee mixed in the kitchen as I opened the microwave door. I dipped a churro into the coffee and took a bite. Much to my dismay the core of the churro was disappointingly inedible. I couldn’t get my teeth through it. I guess the paper bag had absorbed all of the tenderizing grease out of the churro and left the center of it a tough, dry, gristly, corpse. Or, at least that’s how it tasted.
As a physicist, I can now posit what I call, “Hauptman’s Churro Theory” which states that the best churros are fresh churros.

This entry was posted by jon on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.