After 8 hours on the night bus… a wacky experience for a couple reasons… we have arrived in our new home on the coast. Bienvenidos a Canoa! There are about 4-6k local residents here and the resto are tourists (like us). However it is off season right now and the sun is rarely out:( despite daily temperatures of 70-80 Fahrenheit. Our boss, Ross, is from the EEUU and our job would have been cooking vegetarian dinners, although business is slow in October and Ross is having us paint instead! He heard that we were interested in art and he had a vision for the bar/ restaurant area of the hostel to be like sitting in a rainforest canopy. I will post more pictures later, but the daily schedule is somewhat like wakey, eat some free brefkast, start painting until we can’t do. It. Anymore. (we are painting a ceiling and our necks are constantly crackling from staring upwards for 6 hours every day). Carm and I usually break for lunch or a beer and walk to the ocean or go shopping for dinner. Today we bought carrots (x2), peppers (x2), one onion, lime (x2), and three fatty beets for $1. We made rice and stir fried the veggies in our weird orange oil. It gives everything we eat a very orange tint because it has achiote fruit extract. Also I ran across the street to find SALSA PICANTE because have I MENTIONED the lack of spices around here???? Seafood (enconadas, ceviches, and cazuelas seem to be flavored extremely well) but aside from this the only hot sauce we can find is this racist “oriental”/ “salsa de China” stuff that I put on most of my meals. It doesn’t actually taste like anything except heat. There is ají sauce which is DANK but rare here on the coast.
Our hostel is across the street from the Pacific Ocean and the beach is lined with open air Cabañas that pretty much have the same menus: seafood, omelettes, rice, smoothies. Carmen and I have access to a dangerous, but nevertheless functioning, camp stove and REFRIGERATOR! So we have been trying to cook a lot and save money here. We spend the majority of our days painting and listening to audiobooks/ podcasts. Once the sun goes down (6:30pm ish) we read, watch movies in Spanish, journal, play with beach dogs and chat with boys on bikes around the skatepark. There are no girls here (except the 70 year olds that sell fruit and juice). More on this to come.
Today a woman from Alabama offered to pay us to paint her house but I doubt we will have time:( These trees are taking a hot sec and Ross wants them exactly like he pictured in his mind… next year if we have more time maybe we can just paint things around South America. So far we’ve met some UN workers, Fullbright scholars, trash/ sustainable architects, teachers, backpackers (duh), tattoo artists, and deejays of a plethora of nationalities and backgrounds.
More on Canoa pronto!! Up next: storage closets, puppies, itchy skin, and pb and j to go
Chao pescao🦀