Soup

Now, I wouldn't ordinarily dedicate an entire post to a food, but I am making an exception, since I have recently had an interesting experience.

Soup is not something I would eat in the states. Ever. When asked about "soup or salad" the choice for me was really closer to "house or cesar" but here in the big H, people seem to love soup. When I first got to Valle de Angeles my counter-part took me all the way to the capitial to his brother's restaurant called "spoons" so we could have soup for lunch. That day, I was the only one who had soup. It was a veggie soup with a pleasant aroma, but the odd thing about it was: they served me nearly a half gallon of it. Now, I'll admit, my primary issue with soup is that it realy doesn't "eat like a meal" rather it just makes me wish I had ordered something else. For the first time in my life, I was forced to actually stop eating a soup from being so full.

Well, as it would turn out, that was not going to be my last odd experience with soup. Every Sunday, Valle de Angeles comes alive with "rica sopa de mondongo" which translates into rich cow stomach soup. Now it is not tripe, since tripe only has the thinnest sliver of lining and no muscle, but her in Honduras, we eat the whole thing, muscle and all. In my experience their are 2 types of mondongo soup"good" and "I would rather die than eat another bite of this" and there is no difference that can be seen. One must try (and pay for) the soup to know. After eating about 4 varieties, I now know where to go, and I thought my soup adventures were over, since while I eat more soup than I ever have in the past, nothing could be as absurd as mondongo.

Until I found out a friend of mine lived near a comedor that had "garobo" soup every Tuesday. Garobo used to be one of Honduras' most treasured animals: the black iguana. That is of course, until they started eating it. Now it is very close to extinction. Hondurans had a problem. They loved the sweet lizard meat, but couldn't continue eating it without destroying the remaining population. The conflict was solved by the introduction of another animal to the menu: the green iguana, which they found tasted exactly the same, and was plenitful. So the name stuck, but the animal changed. As soon as I found this out, I was doomed to eat it. I love new things and lizard was something I had never eaten. Yesterday, I made the 4 hour trip out to the dirty,dirty and I rode in the back of a truck for almost a full hour to make it in time for lunch, where I enjoyed the delicacy of girobo soup. The texture of the meat was like rubbery chicken and the taste sweet with a tang to it. I got 2 pieces of girobo in my soup, a leg and a large potion of tail. The soup also came with green bananas, potato, rice, potaste and some soft tortillas. Mine was gone in a minute despite the fact it was at least 90 degrees and I was eating hot soup in a room without air conditioning. The soup was refreshing and I will have it again. The only thing I want to know is if what I ate was green or black, since I have major issue eating endanged animals, but no problem at all eating iguanas. When I used to work at the pet store iguanas would always come in agressive and mean and many managed to hit me with thier little club tail or bite me. So this is a big old: I WIN to the animal kingdom.

I still haven't pulled all the pictures off my camera,

Until then.