Four Month Anniversary.

Today marks the four month anniversary of my start as a Volunteer with the Peace Corps (Thanks for the reminder Anna Brandt).  Four Months ago today, I arrived to staging in Philadelphia, 27 years old and feeling uneasy, curious, and enthusiastic about the next 27 months of life. Today, I still carry the same set of feelings, although this time it’s my stomach that’s uneasy and not my nerves.  I think it was the Cabanga I tried on the street that got to me… don’t judge me for drinking street food.

Cabanga (I think that’s the name…subject to change when I learn it for real), is a homebrewed alcoholic beverage they make here by fermenting what is essentially just corn flour and water.  It’s thick, off-white, soupy and sour.  It’s got a consistent texture on par with watered down corn-flour pancake batter, which is essentially what it is, less all the stuff that makes pancake batter taste awesome.  The taste reminds me a lot of the fermented mare’s milk they drink in Kazakhstan to quench their thirst on hot days, except that was a delicacy and from what I understand, this is more of a desperate substitute for alcohol when people are unable to afford the $0.66 fifth of plastic-bottle gin.

Cabanga, yo.

There’s tons of people who sell this stuff all over the place.  They make it in a big bucket and then set up camp somewhere to sell their product to you – still festering as it ferments in the bucket – by the cup for five mets (about $0.17) a pop. It’s a steal, really is.  When you give the brewer (typically a woman dressed in a flashy capulana and sporting a pejorative facial expression that makes you feel like you just kicked a child) payment for the viscous libation, she hands you a small plastic mug to drink out of that she’s just used to scoop out a hearty portion of a substance that probably should be baked rather than sipped.  You then sit, relax, and chew the fat (and the drink) with the other locals enjoying their inebriating bread water.  When you’re done, you hand the cup back to the woman, who then uses it, unwashed, to serve another patron.  Yummy.

Kind of like every trip to Vegas ever, the experience itself is a whole lot more pleasant in the moment, than the feeling you get when you walk away and start thinking to yourself “Oh my god, what did I just do to my body.”