Eating Our Way Up the East Coast

A few days after Christmas, it was time to bid farewell to Indiana and head east. When our ride to New York fell through, Andy's brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to let us hitch a ride to the DC area with them...and crash their overnight pit stop in Wheeling, West Virginia...and move into their guest room for a few days while we rejiggered our New Year's plans. Thanks, guys!

And if all that wasn't enough, they took us to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, VA, where we had some of the best burgers of our lives.

Behold my pepper-crusted slab o'beef, complete with sherry mushrooms, sauteed peppers, grilled onions, roasted garlic, and a side of sweet potato fries. Yummmmm.
What's bigger, Andy's burger or his head?
These burgers have us seriously thinking about moving to Arlington when we return from our travels. I hear that Obama likes them, too!

Moving on--our next stop was the Philadelphia area, where we spent the night with some of my cousins. An outing to a nearby mall afforded me the chance to try Taco Bell for the first time in my life. Here I am with a bean burrito--not bad for $1!
Here is the only non-food picture you'll see in this post--me dancing with two of my cousins. They also performed an awesome rap about grammar, in which I did not participate...but as a former editor, I heartily approved.
On to Allentown, PA, where we spent New Year's with our friend Julie and her family. We decided to go pretty much for an all-Asian food theme, starting with a Dim Sum lunch at a local restaurant.
Then, for a New Year's Eve project, we made dumplings! Zillions and zillions of them--turns out that an assembly line of three people gets the job done pretty efficiently. We made some pork-and-scallion ones, and some chicken-carrot-curry ones. Both types came out amazingly delicious.

Not to mention artistic-looking! Here are some raw dumplings, featuring the lovely fluted edges that Julie taught us how to make.
Cooked--browned on the bottom in a little oil then quickly steamed in the same pan. (This picture makes me hungry.)
Cooked through? Affirmative!
Finally, we boarded a Bieber Bus and made our long-awaited return to New York on January 1, 2010. Our first few days in the suburbs at my parents' house were pretty quiet, involving a lot of sleeping, laundry, and oh, just a little adventure with bot flies.

To shake things up, we did a family outing to a BBQ restaurant in Long Beach called Swingbellys, which is supposed to have the best 'cue on Long Island.

What we liked: the big portion sizes, the free spicy peanuts on the table, the excellent sides, and the smokey BBQ sauce.

What we didn't like: the flavorless meats (they were tender, but had no smoky taste), and the sickeningly sweet honey-based BBQ sauces.

Verdict: Andy and I probably won't be going back...though my parents liked it better than we did and might return. (If I go back with them, I'm getting the side-dish combo!)

But here are some pictures for ya. Andy got a half-rack of ribs and some very tasty sweet potato fries...
...and I got the brisket and pulled pork combo with some deliciously creamy mac and cheese. I also tasted my dad's side of beans, which was delicious, and my mom's sausage, which had a bit of zing and was the best of all the meats we ordered.
Speaking of mac and cheese, I was very excited to have access to a kitchen again, and on our second night at my parents' house, baked my favorite mac and cheese recipe ever. It's not exactly health food, but with whole wheat pasta and spinach, it's not the worst thing in the world for you. And so delicious! (Andy and I also baked some ratatouille, but who wants to see pictures of vegetables?)
If you've ever spent any time in Manhattan with Andy, then I'm sure he has taken you to Pongsri Thai for coconut rice, followed by a visit to the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. It wasn't long before we made this pilgrimage ourselves, and a warmly-gloved Andy was enjoying his customary pint of coconut and pineapple ice creams.
Here we are reuniting with our friends and fellow world travelers Ben and Megan, of the Ben and Megan Round the World Blog! Hm, I guess that there is technically no food in this picture, either, but there were some delicious birthday cupcakes just out of the frame of this shot...
Later that night, Andy finishes off some Hoppin' John at a friend's place--no plate needed.
The next day, we met my friend Kate and her adorable baby in Harlem for lunch at one of our favorite Ethiopian restaurants, Zoma. We got a veggie combo and a meat combo to share--here's the meat one. Their injera isn't our favorite, but the food itself is terrific, and two combos are the perfect size to feed four adults. (Or, um, three adults with big appetites, like me, Andy, and Kate!) And they even brought out a plate of unspiced chickpea puree for the baby!
Final food pic: The "mango flowers" appetizer at Regional Thai in Chelsea. It's not our favorite place for the more standard Thai dishes, but these steamed balls of peanut and chicken drizzled with mango sauce and ginger soy sauce may just be the tastiest (and prettiest!) dumpling dish I've ever had. I recommend skipping the curries and getting an order of these to yourself for dinner if you ever go there!
That's it for now for the east coast. Coming soon: Food, theater, and adventure in the American Southwest!

Our Hoosier Home Visit

For all our readers who have complained about our lack of recent posts (most of whom are related to us), we apologize. I'd like to say that we were off fighting rebels in Sudan or that Tara had to go accept her Nobel Prize in Literature, but the truth is that we have spent the last couple weeks negotiating with Somali pirates to join their ranks when we are in Somalia. And visiting friends, family, and a donut FACTORY in the American Southwest. More on all that later. Now, we take you all the way back in time to December, 2009. We bring you the sights and foods of Indiana.

Before we get to Indiana, it is necessary to tell how we got there. From Belize, we flew to Dallas. Here, we planned to spend the night in the airport before flying to Indiana the next morning. (The next morning, by the way, was Tara's birthday. Feel free to send me your jeers now for letting my wife sleep in an airport on her birthday.) We really wanted to try a BBQ place at the Dallas airport that closed at 9pm and our flight arrived just after 7pm, so we thought we would have time. We painlessly got through customs, but then had a problem: the restaurant was inside security and we were outside.

We went to security and showed them our boarding passes for the following morning. The guard, in a Gandalf voice, said, "You shall not pass." He informed us that he could only let us through if our flight was that night. While discussing what to do, Tara realized that an Indiana-bound flight had been delayed, so we made the decision to try to switch to that flight so that they would let us through security and we could try the BBQ place.

So, we run to the counter and stand in line behind about 10 people whose flight was canceled and who all seem to need to desperately get to Paris. We finally get to the front around 8:35pm, and they happily give us seats on the Indiana flight that now is scheduled to leave around 11pm. Great! But they tell us there is no way the bag we had to check (because it had liquid presents in it) will make that flight and won't arrive until the following morning. Not so great. But BBQ is more important than luggage, so we run to security and wave our new tickets in the security guy's face. We had left our guns at home, so we got through quickly and ran to the BBQ place.

We arrived there at 8:47pm. Closed.

The people cleaning said, "Maybe next time." I replied, "There won't be a next time." As it turned out, we return there a couple blog posts from now. We were forced to settle for some fries at Popeye's. Though we discovered on our travels that Americans do not have a monopoly on deep-fried goods, we did miss seasoned fries.

So, we decided to stay on the Indiana flight. It arrived at Indianapolis at around 3am. I didn't trust the luggage people that our luggage wouldn't arrive, and so Tara started making our bed while I waited for 20 minutes on the luggage. That was smart since our luggage turned out to be on the flight. Indianapolis has a lovely new airport where we had never been. In this airport, they have benches in the luggage return area that push together and form a full-sized bed. Here is Tara in our "bed", which was better than some hotels in South America, though no one ever came into our hotel rooms to collect their luggage.
My brother and sister-in-law collected us the next morning from our sleeping quarters, and I announced that we were going to Steak'n'Shake for Tara's birthday lunch. Yep, strike two against me. I made her sleep in the airport on her birthday and then decided where we were going for lunch. However, going to Steak'n'Shake on the way home from the airport is somewhat of a family tradition, and my family's traditions are not to be ignored. For those who have never been to Steak'n'Shake, you should fly to the nearest city that has one. They have very tasty milkshakes and great burgers for very cheap (by American standards). Here is my triple burger and Tara's shake (mine was already gone), along with her biscuits and gravy.

To try to redeem myself for making Tara sleep in an airport, I asked my brother to buy a pinata and fill it with Reese's products for Tara's birthday. This is because: a.) every time we saw a pinata in Central America, Tara would tell me this story about how great it was when she once had a pinata as a child; and b.) Reese's products top the list of things most missed while away (we found peanut butter cups in only one place for a ridiculous $4 for two). My brother had the genius to find a Dora the Explorer pinata. Here is Tara ready to swing.

Here is Tara after the swing. Dora appears to be laughing at Tara.
Dora was finally disembodied after some swinging by the whole family. Fortunately, my brother thought of this possibility and cut a separate hole in Dora's head so that he could fill it with candy, too...

Despite finding a Dairy Queen in Panama, it is always nice to be back at the home DQ. Here is Tara at the year-round DQ in Terre Haute with my mom in the background. Mom won't be happy about being pictured here. Hi, Mom! [Note: As expected, my mother threatened me physical harm if I didn't take her out. Instead, I replaced her with someone who didn't mind being in the picture.]

Tara was incredibly excited about having salad again, which isn't common south of the US. I wish I had something funny to say about this salad, but Tara's excitement about it is funny enough.
Tara's favorite store in Terre Haute is Baesler's, which is probably most comparable to Whole Foods. The main prize for Tara is the Trader's Point drinkable yogurt from a nearby dairy (Tara is snuggling it in the picture). She loves the stuff. In New York, she decided to buy a bottle of this yogurt instead of a house. In Terre Haute, it only costs as much as a car.
Tara is continually amazed at the local park where many of the schools and some other organizations decorate a shelter for Christmas. This was one of my favorites because it had a lot of stuff moving. Yep, I'm that simple. It moves; therefore, I like it.
We also discovered Peanut Butter Lovers Reese's cups. This is a great innovation. I personally eat them only for the peanut butter. In this version, they ripped off the top layer of chocolate and replaced it with a much tastier peanut butter top. Good job, Reese's!
The holy grail of Terre Haute cuisine (haute cuisine, get it?) is Square Donuts. These are the best donuts in the world, and they are square. From left to right and top to bottom: strawberry with cream filling, vanilla with cream filling, cinnamon and sugar with apple filling, vanilla with lemon filling, strawberry with cream filling, peanut butter with raspberry jam filling, cinnamon and sugar with apple filling, vanilla with lemon filling, strawberry with cream filling, cinnamon and sugar with cream filling, vanilla with cream filling, cinnamon roll. Hooray, Square Donuts!
While at home, our friend Jan was kind enough to make some South American haute cuisine for us. This one is dulce de leche ice cream. So as to appear civil, I took only a small amount in my bowl. I repeated this process four more times.
Jan also baked some Colombian cheese bread. Tara found it quite good. I gave it the evil eye.
Terre Haute is home to a sushi place called Sushi Umi. It is considered by many on the Internet to be some of the best sushi in the Midwest, if not the country. We didn't believe this possible, so we had to try it. I don't like sushi, so here is my chicken katsu. It was good, but it also fulfilled my other criteria: it was big.
Here is some sushi. Looks like a couple nasty eel things in the back and a nasty eel tempura roll in the front. Tara said it might be the best sushi she has ever had. So, congratulations to Sushi Umi. Who knew that you could get such great fish out of the Wabash River?
My sister took on the project of baking something different that each person requested. This seems crazy to me, but she seemed to enjoy it. The hardest part was baking the devil cat in the back which looks just like Quincy, our cat.
Lastly, we tried the local Indian buffet, which started out as food being sold in an Indian-owned gas station, and then became a real restaurant. It was not the best Indian food on earth, but was substantially better than we expected from Indiana. I certainly ate my $9 worth. In case you wondered, you can tell this is Tara's plate rather than mine because it is not overflowing off the sides.

We had a really good time during our week in Indiana and tried some really great food. It was nice to be home for awhile, and we look forward to returning, even if it might be in another year or so...

Financial Updates: Central (and some of South) America

Time to share our last batch of country expenditure averages! Mostly, Central America was very cheap, and the last few countries in South America were pretty easy on the wallet as well. We left off last time with Peru, so here goes with…

Ecuador: $78.50/day. Not bad at all, though our average was definitely lowered by Andy spending 24 hours in bed with food poisoning in Quito, which meant we had to skip a possibly expensive birding excursion…and, of course, we didn’t go to the Galapagos, which would have blown our budget sky-high. Bus quality was not the highest in Ecuador, but hotel rooms (in the $15-$25 range with private bath) were very decent, and both street food and restaurant food was cheap.

Colombia: $56/day without flight to Panama; $83/day with. Our flight from Colombia to Panama was more expensive than we anticipated—about $250 each with taxes, etc., and we weren’t sure which country to count it against, so in the end we just split it between Colombia and Panama. But even with the flight, Colombia ended up cheaper on paper than we’d anticipated. It doesn’t feel so cheap when you’re there! But Andy and I have noticed that sometimes in countries that seem expensive to us, we compensate by eating out less and doing fewer packaged tours, so it ends up being cheap.

Anyway, accommodation ranged from $10 a night in Santa Marta to $40 a night in Cartagena; and we recommend that you visit Bogota on a Tuesday (half-price movie night) and Wednesday (half-price day at the Salt Cathedral) and stay at the Hostal Platypus (where we got a whole apartment with kitchen for $25 a night) in the old city.

Panama: $98/day without flight from Colombia; $144/day with flight. Yeah, Panama, not so cheap, mainly because excursions are really expensive. And that’s because you usually end up hiring a private guide to take you around. But our trip would not have been the same without birding at Pipeline Road, the train trip along the Panama Canal, and our tour of the Gatun Locks—all worth the money. Hotel room with bath was $20 a night, and restaurants were affordable enough.

Costa Rica: $50/day. This is really skewed, because we only spent two days in CR, and did no excursions except for one trip to the beach (which cost us $13 because it was a national park—we didn’t know about the free beach up the road). We avoided restaurants and stayed in the very cheapest rooms we could find ($20 a night). So that average is really just for rooms, bus, and groceries…if you take a real trip to Costa Rica, expect to pay a lot more (as we did in 2007!).

Nicaragua: $60/day. Nicaragua is the poorest country in Latin America, and definitely one of the cheapest to be a tourist in. We never paid more than $12 a night for a room (but don’t expect high quality at those prices), and tours and Internet were very affordable. We found food to be a little expensive compared to everything else, but, clearly, we got by.

El Salvador: $60/day. El Salvador is definitely wealthier than Nicaragua, but somehow we ended up spending the same amount of money there. Probably because, once again, we did no packaged tours, but just figured out the bus system and went places on our own. Also managed to hit the capital on half-price movie night (it’s Wednesdays in ES). Food is pretty cheap (and tasty!), and our $20/night room in San Salvador was decent. El Salvador is high value.

Honduras: $64/day. We only spent one night in Honduras, so this is pretty skewed, but we hear it’s a pretty cheap country to travel in overall. We stayed in Copan, near the big Mayan ruins ($10 a night for hotel room with bath—cheap; $15 each to visit the ruins—kind of expensive, but very nice ruins). I wouldn’t mind going back sometime and exploring when it’s more stable politically.

Guatemala: $57/day. I think that this makes Guatemala officially the cheapest country we spent any real length of time in. Lodging was around $10 a night (and nicer than the rooms in Nicaragua), and some excursions were quite cheap ($3 each to climb Pacaya Volcano). We thought restaurants were overpriced in some places (like touristy Antigua), so we just ate street food or made sandwiches or cooked. Annoyingly, Guatemala practices “tourist pricing” on some boat and bus routes, meaning that foreigners officially have to pay three times the rate that the locals pay for the same transportation.

Belize: $124/day, strongly skewed by SCUBA diving. (It would have been $78/day without the dives.) Basically, diving is expensive, but the rest of Belize—even touristy Caye Caulker Island—doesn’t have to be. Our rooms ranged from $12.50 to $25 a night, bus transport wasn’t too bad, and with a little sleuthing, we managed to find cheap places to eat out in most towns. The ATM caving tour was a little expensive ($75 per person) but totally worth it. And diving off the Cayes was quite expensive, but also worth it. (There is apparently much cheaper diving off the Bay Islands in Honduras—maybe next time!)

We’ll do another financial update soon, in which we calculate our average daily expenditure for the whole South and Central American trip, working in extra costs like flights, insurance, and camera repair and replacement that we didn’t count against any one country. Until then, adios!

Obsessed: Central America (and the rest of South America)!

If you check out the labels, or tags, on this blog, you will see that Andy has written 52 entries so far and I have only done 45. Maybe that’s because he writes all the obsessions and finance posts. Well, no more—it’s my turn to tell you with what things the countries we visited on the last leg of our trip were obsessed!

South America:

Peru – Coca leaves. Old men chewing them, breakfaster-eaters brewing them…the dried leaves of the coca plant (which, after a whole lot of processing, can become cocaine) are everywhere in Peru (and Bolivia) and illegal to grow or possess in most other South American countries. In their “natural” state, they’re supposed to be stimulating and help fight altitude sickness. I did try a cup of coca tea one morning—not bad, it tasted like green tea, but it had no noticeable effects on me.

Ecuador – The Galapagos. Based on the number of posters you see at travel agencies for Galapagos trips, you’d think that Ecuador has nothing else cool to visit. That is definitely not true—we didn’t make it to the Galapagos, and Ecuador was still one of my favorite countries!

Colombia – Cheese bread! Or maybe that’s just my obsession when in Colombia. Still, there were many different varieties, and you could find it just about anywhere. There were even people baking it in a hut in the middle of Tayrona National Park!

Central America:

Panama – The United States. With US dollars, English-speakers, and Dairy Queens galore, Panama felt more like America than anywhere else we went on the trip. The canal may be in their hands now, but let’s just say that our cultural presence is still felt.

Costa Rica – Not being like the rest of Central America. The government? Stable. The volcanoes? Quiet. The hotels? Expensive. The public buses? Not school buses, and definitely not blasting salsa music, either. Does this place even still qualify as part of Central America?

Nicaragua – The Virgin Mary. Nicaraguans actually invented a whole new holiday that consists of carrying a giant doll of Maria around town and lining up to sing songs to her. Need we say more?

El Salvador – Malls. San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, has more fancy shopping malls than we have ever seen before in one place. We have no idea how they all stay in business, because the last time we checked, El Salvador wasn’t such a big country, it’s populace wasn’t exactly the richest in the world, and it didn’t have a whole lot of tourists! Still trying to figure this one out…

Guatemala – Volcanoes. They’re everywhere, and they’re erupting RIGHT NOW.

Honduras – Throwing trash out the window of a moving bus (arrrgh!). OK, that’s kind of unfair—I think that every country in Central America is obsessed with doing this. It gave me and Andy little strokes each time we saw it happen (and, even worse, when we saw people encouraging their young children to treat the road like it was a garbage can). But I feel like people did it even more than usual on the buses we took across southern Honduras, and I can’t really think of anything else that country seemed obsessed with (no one was talking about the whole election/coup thing in the more rural areas where we were), so Honduras gets the rap for this one.

Belize – Cruise ships. Apparently, cruise ships have started docking in Belize, and no one can decide whether this is good or bad for the country. Belize City seems pro, as it has set up a whole tourist village in which to sell expensive souvenirs to cruisers, while the people who run the awesome ATM caving tour in the west of the country are con, since they think that cruise excursions there would ruin the delicate artifacts in the cave. The folks at the jaguar reserve seemed conflicted—they’d like the extra revenues, but will more people disturb the jaguars? No, because there aren’t actually any jaguars in the part of the park where people can go!

That’s it for obsessions! If you’ve been to any of these countries, what do you think of our choices?

Belizean Chow

The food of our final Central American country was a good way to get back into an American mindset. Because Belize was a British colony, it has some typically western foods as well as Indian food. However, it also has lots of Mexican and Central American influence. Identifying a uniquely Belizean cuisine would be difficult, but overall the food was good.

Just around the corner from our hotel in San Ignacio, we found a corner store that had slush for 50 cents a glass (the sign says $1.00, but that is Belizean dollars, which are only worth $0.50 each). Root beer is one of my favorite flavors, so I was sad when they were out of "Root Bear", but I did try most of the other flavors in the two days that we were there.

We also found a very good Sri Lankan restaurant in San Ignacio. A bit pricey, but the tastiest food from that part of the world that we had eaten since leaving New York.

For dessert, we had what I would describe as a cinnamon flan. They said it was a traditional Sri Lankan dessert, though. Not bad, though things of this texture are always a bit weird.On our trip to the supermarket, we discovered a Laughing Cow cheese knock-off: Happy Cow. It is in almost every supermarket and comes from Austria. Tara says it is even better than Laughing Cow cheese. I just like the blatancy of the identity theft.

Tara was very excited to find a place in the market selling El Salvadorian pupusas. These weren't nearly as good as we had in El Salvador, but were certainly edible.

We also rediscovered cookies that we had first tried in Trinidad (where they are made). This was one of our favorite brands, though not as good as Wibisco coconut cookies. If you go to Trinidad, try them. If you go to Belize, settle for those pictured below.

In Belize, they have cohune nuts. Sort of like a small, super strong coconut, they taste like a low fat coconut (drier and harder). The locals make jewelry out of the super hard shells. I gnawed as much as I could out of this one before tossing it to the fish in the stream, which also seemed to enjoy it.

After our day tour to the cave, we had dinner with some of the people from our trip by going around to street vendors and seeing what was for sale. An Indian woman was selling homemade samosas (beef or veggie, so I guess she probably wasn't Hindu...). They were tasty enough that I ate about 5 of them and could have eaten about another 10 had she not sold out of them.

After the samosas, it was on to the hotdog vendor. He got our attention by shouting, "Try Johnny's Lime Juice: the best lime juice in Belize that has a name!" We started talking to him (he was clearly American) and he grew up in Philly, but has been living in Belize for a few years. The funniest part is that there is a second hot dog cart right next to him in a corner, which was nearly hidden from view. He tells us that this guy used to work for him and his brother at the hot dog cart, and that they would let him sleep on their couch. The guy then decides to open his own hot dog cart in the tiny, invisible corner behind the cart where he used to work. The vendor then loudly points out that he's sold about 20 hot dogs while we were standing there talking to him and this other guy hasn't sold any.

Following the hot dogs, we headed to the taco stand. The tacos were good, but not as good as the ones we had in Guatemala. Unlike some other people in Belize, the vendors did not laugh at me when I instinctively said "gracias" instead of "thank you".

Food in Belize was expensive. So, while I was eating all the great stuff in the posts above, I made Tara eat peanut butter and banana on a tortilla. Though if you are a regular reader of our blog, you realize that I wouldn't willingly give peanut butter to anyone else...

The British influence leads to an abundance of meat pies. They were tasty, though we thought a couple times about Sweeney Todd since we had absolutely no idea what kind of meat was in the pies. I can confirm that there was no kidney because I've had kidney pie and it tastes like pee.

While in the rainforest, we found these tiny wild guavas. They had about one bite each, which is about as much guava as I want to eat without sugar.

In Belize City, we bought this corn drink on the street. I would describe it as sweetened cream of corn soup in a cup. Not bad, but as much as I love corn, the concept of corn flavored drinks still seems strange to me.

During our stay on Caye Caulker, we quickly located the cheapest restaurants on the island. Our favorite was a Mexican place called El Something. No, that isn't the actual name, but I can't remember the name. If you are on Caye Caulker, it is a shack across from the bakery near the bank. These are salbutes, which are basically puffy fried tacos. Tasty. (*Note from Tara: The restaurant is called El Paso.)

While on the beach, a kid came up and tried to sell us something with coconut and brown sugar. After some price negotiations, we ended up buying this very tasty empanada-like item. We would later have something similar in Belize City which they called a coconut crust. Highly recommended if you can find them. I tracked the kid down the next day, but they had run out of coconut.

We became regulars at the bakery on Caye Caulker because they had these amazing cinnamon rolls. By regulars, I mean that we visited no less than seven times during the three days we were on the island. Based on my amazing hairstyle in this one, I think it is either right after scuba diving or right after we got up.

After walking around looking for restaurants with our new friends, Mandi and Tommy, we decided that this guy with a grill and this sign beside the road was the way to go for dinner. Why? 1.) The chef's special is garlic butter. 2.) As though we needed a second reason, it was the cheapest place around and all three picnic tables they had set up were packed. 3.) The guy who was in charge weighed at least 450 pounds, so clearly he liked the food.

Tara (and basically every customer except for me, who doesn't eat lobster) got the grilled lobster tails. Tara really liked them. So much so that I feared for the life of the lobsters we saw scuba diving the next day.

We had some squeezable jelly left that we needed to finish. Here is Tara doing her best to accomplish that.

If Belize has any traditional food, this would be it. Stew meat with rice that has some beans mixed in and a side of potato salad. It's not bad, and is certainly filling, but I'd rather have ice cream.

Look, my wish came true. If you are in Belize City, go to Blue Bird Cafe, where they have delicious ice cream that seems far cheaper than anywhere else in Belize. We tried the coconut, peanut, and cinnamon. So good that we had another pint for breakfast the next morning.

Belize also has something called fry jacks that seem popular no matter the time of day. Here are a couple of them. Essentially fried dough. I can understand why that is popular, but it seems like they should be served with a mound of sugar on them.

Here is Tara with her last yogurt of the Americas portion of the trip. This one is actually a Mexican yogurt. She liked it, but proclaimed it somewhat unhealthy. She also enjoyed the Western Dairies local yogurt made by Mennonites, but it cost about the same amount as a hotel room, so her consumption was limited.

That's it. Foods of Belize is over. You can go back to your regularly scheduled job now. But don't fret--we'll have foods of Indiana coming soon.

Special Post: Belize Going to Tara's Head

If you get sick when you see a tick on you or when someone shows you a surgical scar, this probably is not the post for you. On the other hand, if you think tapeworms are "cool" or secretly hope that you are one day in a position to have to do an emergency tracheotomy on someone with a ballpoint pen, you will enjoy this post.

In the jaguar reserve in Belize, the forest was filled with bottle flies (also known as bot flies or botflies). The bites itched like crazy for days. As it turns out, that is not the whole story. Around the time we got back to the US, Tara began complaining of two sores on her head that burned and caused a lot of pain. We believed them to be bug bites and she thought maybe her winter hat was to blame for the irritation since she had not previously worn it. But when the "bites" did not go away, we started searching on the Internet for possible causes.

Yesterday, we finally hit the jackpot with these websites: One and Two. These sites describe the botfly, a Central American fly known for laying larvae in humans that cause a lot of pain. Tara's symptoms perfectly fit those described. I was nearly giddy that Tara had some worms living in her head and couldn't wait to see them. Tara was, well, the opposite of giddy. So, we set out to try to get the two little guys to show themselves to confirm the diagnosis.

Because they breathe air through a little hole, we were able to cover to hole with Vaseline. Bingo. Out came the tips of the worms through the Vaseline to breathe. As soon as I went near them, they went back into her head at lightning speed. So, to try to kill them, she tried taking an Epsom salt bath and keeping her head under the water for almost an hour. Some people reported that this works well, and it seemed like an easy solution. As soon as she dried her hair, I could see the little fellows gasping for air. Apparently, they had been getting breath-holding lessons from David Blaine.

Next, we covered them with New-Skin for the night to cut off their air supply. New-Skin is basically fingernail polish that is meant to go on small cuts and scrapes for protection. This morning when we got up, we peeled the New-Skin off one of them and the dead worm was visible. I just had to pull him out slowly with some tweezers. He was way longer than I expected and just kept coming. However, the other one was not to be seen. I hoped that he was dead, but when I repeated the Vaseline trick, out he came. We covered him with New-Skin again, but he ate right through it. We're trying again and will use super glue if that doesn't work. The good news is that he has apparently stopped eating Tara's flesh while fighting for his life so he isn't as painful.

Now for the pictures! The first is the hole in her head. In the middle of the hole, you will see a small white dot. That is the head of the larva sticking out. The second is the worm (we will call him George) after extraction sitting on my first-aid kit. You can see the lettering on a Band-aid for a size comparison. The little black things you can see are barbs that it used to stay stuck inside her.

We hope to get the second one out soon. Now is your chance to suggest a name for the second one! If the name is good enough, maybe Tara will let him grow to be full size (about the size of a caterpillar), but that's a lot of Tara's head that it would have to eat, so the name will have to be really good.

(Note from Tara: FYI, I just wanted to note that these are not in any way contagious or transferable from human to human, or human to pillowcase, or anything like that, so if I have slept at your house recently, you have nothing to fear! They can only live inside the body, and can only reproduce once they have reached the adult fly stage, which is never going to happen here in the US. Still, bleh.)

Addendum: On the morning of January 4, we were able to pull the second, larger, larva out of Tara's head. Based on our experiences, we suggest covering the hole with an thick layer of New-Skin (or fingernail polish if that's all you have), letting it sit overnight, then pulling it off. The head of the suffocated worm is likely to be there ready to pull out. If the larvae are not in your head but elsewhere in your body, it seems that some good old duct tape would be just as effective and easier to apply/remove.