Nutricious-delicious

Last night I went to the supermarket with Novio and his cousin to buy the ingredients for a Shepherds Pie. I said that today in the morning I would stay at home and cook them a delicious-nutritious Shepherds Pie for when they came home at lunchtime. Alas, the supermarket did not have any butter, margarine or milk so I fear my delicious topping of creamy mash might not be as creamy and smooth as I had hoped for. Novio´s cousin helpfully pointed out that if we went to a Mercal, then we would be able to get the required ingredients at cheap (government subsidised) prices. He may be right, but having struggled through from 6am to 8pm just wanting to go back to bed, the thought of joining the Mercal mega-queue to get my litre of milk and 250g of butter was not an appealing one.

This morning I decided to go into the office rather than stay at home. Novio and I dropped his sister off at the office and then went to buy us some breakfast. We had empanadas which is a very typical breakfast here. It is a flour, water and sugar dough, filled with cheese, meat, fish or beans and then deep fried. Delicious-not-nutricious!! When I was here a year ago, if I ever ate empanadas I used to pay 3-5 bolivars for them. Today we saw some in the supermarket for 10 bolivars, and the ones we eventually bought from an empanaderia were 7. Still, after a year without eating empanada, I was most willing to spend (Novio´s) 7 bolivars to get my mitts on that greasy goodness! Enak enak. (I also rang Freddy and told him the shocking news about the price of empanadas but he assured me that in Caracas in the place under his flat you can still buy a big empanada for 5 bolos. Phew.)

We went to a different supermarket this morning and managed to get some milk, although alas no butter still. The girl in front of us at the til was sporting some very tight lycra clothing and had rather large breasts (not real ones). She also had her mobile phone stuffed into her bra and peeking out of the top. The cleavage is quite a popular place to keep mobile phones here. I´m not sure why it is preferable to a pocket or a bag…maybe it makes pick-“pocketing” harder. Anyway, as the girl finished paying and walked out of the supermarket the boys who pack the bags were all sitting by the window. Novio said to watch them and as she walked past every head swivelled around to follow her out of the shop. I initially was filled with feminist outrage at the objectification of women but actually had to concede that it was an amusing sight. It did reminded me of a conversation I had with an English friend here last year. He´d taken an English conversation class with some girls at the Central University (one of the best in the country) and they´d been discussing plastic surgery. Henry described them as really intelligent, “sassy” women and he said that what they told him was that a lot of men here tend to stray from their relationships and that even though women know that they are doing it, that a lot of them (although by no means all) tend to accept it so that they end up in these kind of semi-bigomous relationships. I don´t know why this is….perhaps just because of the practical difficulties of life as a singleton. I know one friend of Novio´s is in the process of divorcing her husband who was cheating on her. Her mother tells her that she is wrong to do it though – she married him and she should therefore stay with him as she made those vows for life. I´m not sure how they explain why the vows don´t apply to him too though… The next conclusión that Henry and his sassy ladies reached was that women tend to slice themselves up and undergo major surgical procedures in an attempt to meet the “ideal” image of a women and thereby discourage their partner from straying. I know that men everywhere cheat, and I know that women everywhere strive for particular images that are promoted to us as ideal, but here it is done so openly – the cheating and the extreme actions to be the most “attractive”. I´m sure it is only a matter of time before someone helpfully suggests a boob job to me as it used to happen quite often. At least then I would have somewhere new to keep my phone.