fernet!

Now anyone who knows me knows I´m a sucker for anything regional or seasonal, especially flora and fauna, seasonal produce and of course, drinks. I´d already tried the mate, although I can no more claim that than an American who´s only ordered chai lattes from Starbucks can claim he´s tried chai. Besides the yerba mate tea, a very Argentine drink is the Fernet-cola. Fernet is this liquor that´s really bitter. I´ve been antsy for it for a very long time. Well that night at the Van Gogh cafe, I finally ordered it. It came with an endless supply of complimentary peanuts, chips and what looked like farsaan (sp?). Our waitress poured a bit of the liquor in a Collins glass and gave me a longneck of Coca-Cola.

At college frat parties, kids always tilt their glasses to avoid getting too much head in the beer, but I heard that head with truly good beer is a good thing (not a word from you, you know who you are). Well I didn´t bother tilting my glass or pouring slowly. Growing up, the head was my favorite part of coke, and I always like my cup of coke foaming. I believe I threw a temper tantrum because I didn´t get to my cup in time before the fizz was gone. My glass spewed like some sort of cocktail volcano and I desperately tried to clean up the mess with the little napkins on the table. I call them napkins, but I ought to call them oil-absorbing sheets. Rather than paying a pretty penny for fancy oil-absorbing sheets in The Body Shop or even CVS or Target, I think I´ll just jack a bunch of those napkins and bring them back to America with me. I wanted to use them on my face, but the mattifying oil-free moisturizer I bought here, OMS brand, 20 pesos, was doing too good a job. Anyway, as I drank my Fernet-cola, I realized in a trice why it came with all that food.

I came home to Julieta and Susana watching Erin Brockovich, subtitled, not dubbed. None of the four-letter words Julia Roberts uses got properly translated. It´s a bit like watching a movie on Fox. Then I watched Finding Nemo dubbed in Spanish. There were much fewer commercial breaks. I must say, as far as the Disney channel goes, I like it way better here than in the States, where all you see is Hannah Montana and the Cheetah Girls and teeny bopper and jock go to the beach and sing and dance.