La parilla!

Dan: Two times now we’ve been to the city of Godoy Cruz, to the Nicotra house for meals. Luciano and Lidia Nicotra are the parents of my former students, Stella and Monica, back in Minnesota. We’ve had some traditional family meals over there, and their overwhelming hospitality has been nothing less than embarrassing to us. It was a little weird, I have to admit, to have people be so attentive. “Do you want more coke?” “Water?” “Is the chicken good?” “Is that meat cooked enough for you?” “Here have some more salad and bread and potatoes…” ¨Do you want to take a nap?¨Due to a misinterpretation of the word vegetarian, in addition to the traditional grilled beef, a chicken was also grilled for Louann, who politely ate some of it, under the watchful eyes of our hosts. This Sunday we were there for many hours. It was exhausting participating in Spanish conversation for such a long time. Louann mostly just tuned it out entirely until Luciano directly asked her something. The result of this was Luciano believing that she didn’t understand anything. So every once in awhile he made a big point of ‘teaching’ her vocabulary. “Esto es agua. Aaaaaguaaaaa.” He would talk a mile a minute for a half hour straight, then turn to Lou and slowly repeat the name of a fruit 3 or 4 times so she would understand. Lidia would be like, “Honey, she gets it.” I, on the other hand, just kept eating everything that was offered and tried to keep up with the conversations. This Sunday we had chicken, steak and ribs. This picture is of Luciano proudly showing one rack that is almost ready to eat. He is standing in front of his parilla. Every house seems to have one. Apartment buildings have one on the roof that the tenants take turns using. I think grilling might be the national pastime. They cook with wood, so one must be patient waiting for it turn into coals. We tried our own BBQ at the apart/hotel on Saturday. We met a Brit bloke named Ben and a Czech chick named Petra and decided to do our own little cookout with these folks who’ve been traveling South America for 9 months already. Though I initially made the fire at around 7:30, we probably didn’t start eating our steaks until around 11:00 pm, two liters of beer and two bottles of wine later.