A Day on the Farm

On the 28th, Ana decided to take me to visit her relatives that live on a farm not too far outside of the city proper. It was about a half hour drive and all but the last 5 minutes or so were on paved roads. When we got to the farm we were warmly greeted by her various aunts, uncles cousins, and neices. A quick look around revealed it to be a small farm with a dozen chickens, a handful of cows, a bunch of fruit trees, and various dogs and cats.

After we had taken care of the pleasantries, Ana took me on a tour of the farm, showing me around the house, and a small hut in the back of the house, used for cooking and baking. It was about this time that this was perfect evidence that, unlike Eddie Albert, farm living is definitively not the life for me.



I spent the whole time I was there walking around looking at the ground, trying to make sure that I wasn't stepping in something disgusting. At the same time, I had to keep a wary eye on the chickens which kept pecking towards me. When we went to take pictures of the newly born calves, Ana was worried that the bull would charge us. I tried to make sure to keep the hut between myself and the bull at all times after he let forth a rather angry sounding moo while we were taking pictures.




One cool thing is, I finally got to see a cashew tree with fruit on it. I never realized (like most people who have only seen cashews in a bowl of mixed nuts) that cashews grow in a shell as the seed of a fruit that grows on trees. The fruit looks and tastes a little bit like a pear, and they make a juice out of it, which I drank a lot of, and I brought a couple bottles home with me. They call the fruit "caju". This was actually the first time that I had tasted the fruit itself and it was a bit grainy, the texture is very hard to describe, it tasted decent though.

We has lunch while we were there and Ana warned me about this dish that we were going to be served, chicken with a sauce made with chicken blood. Now, I had already had stomach discomfort for a few days and hadn't been eating much, and the whole idea of eating chicken blood is somewhat off-putting for me, considering how rabidly paranoid about salmonella my mother is. However, I had already decided that I was going to try it, as I had tried the other things I had been offered. So first Ana made me a plate, and then for some reason said that she gave me the wrong thing and gave the plate to her mom and made me another plate with essentially the same things. I found out afterward that there was fried chicken and roasted chicken and she had inititally given me fried chicken, but that the sauce is supposed to go on the roasted chicken. Anyway, I tried the sauce, and it wasn't really anything bad at all. My stomach was still not feeling too good, so I didn't eat much. Because I wasn't eating a lot, I was worried that I might look rude, but I was more worried that I was going to get sick all over the place.