The Big Bad Chugchucara

This past Saturday Johnny and I took a 1.5 hour bus ride ($1.50) from Quito to a town in the south called Latacunga. Normally we just pass though this town on the Panamerican Highway on our way to different places even farther south. I will give you one guess as to why we ventured to this small town along the highway. Yup, you probably guessed it... there was an interesting food dish there that we decided we HAD to try. The dish is called Chugchucara (pronounced Choo-Choo-Car-Ah). There were many places in town that offered this and we eventually settled on a nice small place called Chugchucara Emanuel a bit south of the downtown. The dish isn't exactly made up of food you can only get in Latacunga, but Latacunga is the only place that you can get all of it together at the same time.  The dish cost $6 and included: mote with chincharron (hominony with fried pork bits), tostadas (fried corn kernals), papas (potatoes), empenadas (sweet ones with cheese), popcorn, fritada (fried pork chunks), cuero (fried pork skin) and maduras (ripe, fried plantains).

John with the whole dish and some Ají

Everything was super good and we finished it in about 10 minutes. (Note: this plate can be shared but I am sure that John could have eaten two on his own... which is why I love him). I know that my favorite part was the empenadas. We ended up ordering 5 more at the end of the meal for $1. Yum. We ate them while we walked around enjoying the city. After a few moments John spotted the highest point in the city and asked if we could walk up to it. After all, it would not be a trip with John without having to climb something. When we got to the mirador (lookout) we discovered that we could not climb up it. Darn. We did get a really good view of the city from where we were at though.

                 

Before catching the bus back to Quito we went on the hunt for some ice cream. We wanted to get the ice cream of a town near by called Salcedo but we couldn't find any. We settled on a new type of Topsy ice cream. John got coconut and I got chocolate. He liked the chocolate better so we ended up switching halfway through. The bus ride back was uneventful and we were back home before dark.

Interesting fact: Quito has always had a speed limit but it has never been enforced. Everyone just sped and drove wherever they wanted. It was kind of scary at times to be on the road... especially in a bus when the driver took turns at close to 90 MPH. Now the cops are doing something about the limit and they are serious about it. The limits are: 50km Urban and 90km Highway. If you violate this you get fined. A minor violation is: $87.63 fine and 6 points on your license. A major fine (which I believe is only going 10 km over) is 3 DAYS IN JAIL, $292 in fines (equal to one month pay of a minimum wage worker) and 10 points on your license. Can you imagine if they put people in jail for three days if they sped in the states... Ha.