Celebrating a New Year in a new home

The view from the pool area. For my friends in the chilly north the avg. daytime temp is is 82 degrees

New Year's Eve 2012

We took our first trip to find food and household products today. We walked to the Ecuadorian supermarket chain called Super Maxi that is similar to our chain grocery stores back home. What a zoo! It was like Black Friday at Walmart, but in Spanish.

The differences between North American grocery stores and the Super Maxi are small but significant. When you enter Super Maxi you pass a security guard. You pick up a basket at the front door, but the checkout isle is too narrow to allow the cart to go through, so you empty the cart onto the conveyor belt and leave it for the cart guy to retrieve (not very efficient when it's crowded). There is another cart at the end of the checkout counter and the bagger bags your groceries and places them in the new cart.

Milk & eggs are found on a shelf rather than in a cooler. Yogurt comes in bottles rather than tubs. The selection of fruits and vegetables are similar but there are things we never see in the States. Tree tomatoes (savory & sweet), guanabana, naranjllo, taxo, pepino dulce, and mora berry to name just a few. There are canned whole tomatoes but no tomato sauce. The spice selection is limited :-( but I'm hoping to find a larger selection once we venture out to the mercado, which is the local fresh produce and meat market. The majority of the olive oil is from Spain rather than Italy, and the aroma evokes many fond memories of my time spent in Madrid. Beef here is grass fed rather than corn fed, so it's much leaner than we get in the states.

Liquor is expensive here, except for the excellent rum and beer they make in country. Most of the wine seems to come from Chile and Argentina. Boones Farm, Blue Nun, and Martini & Rossi are considered premium brands J We may have to build our own vodka distillery if we want martinis because a small bottle of Absolut Vodka is over $40. But hey, they grow several hundred types of potatoes here so perhaps a business opportunity…

With a lot of patience and "con permiso" we made it out of the grocery store and hopped into a cab for the short ride home. Taking a cab ride to almost anywhere in town costs $1.

I couldn't find, or maybe didn't recognize a prime rib roast at the Super Maxi, so we opted to forego our traditional prime rib dinner in favor of pan seared chicken breast, mashed potatoes and a salad.

Rather than champagne we enjoyed basil mojito's...after we wrestled with the bottle of rum for half an hour. 

The bottle of rum we bought had a normal cap on it, but when we opened the bottle there was what looked like a plastic stopper inside. When I tried to pour the rum into the glass nothing came out! I shook it, turned it upside down, even tried milking it like a cow and nothing, nada, zip. So Ronnie took a knife and proceeded to break the plastic insert out. We've since opened another bottle and there is actually a stopper inside and when you shake the bottle over the glass it pours. Apparently we had a defective bottle the first go round. I swear it wasn't user error!

We signed up for Netflix and streamed episodes of Heroes while we drank mojito's. At midnight one of the residents of our condo complex set off fireworks over the ocean. We toasted a new year in a new home!

Hasta luego, P.