Home to the roost

Well, we will soon be departing our southern residence for our northern domicile. We did not mind missing the record snowfall or the cold rains that followed. But we must return the first week of April to complete the move to our new house and attend to related matters.

Important note: Our telecommunications is likely not to have been completely installed. We will be online irregularly and telephone communications will also probably be problematic (Our new house is in a nearly dead zone for cell phones.). Please allow a few days for us to respond to emails and voice mails. But do continue to send your messages; we will make every effort to respond.

Easter here is quite an affair. The town has been crowded. People have come and gone, mostly to be replaced by another group. Many have two weeks vacation at this time. It has been an experience about which we may write in the future.

Here is perhaps the last story from Mrs. T about this years southern sojourn.

Chickens

When you live in Bucerias there are three important sources of protein. Beans are undoubtedly the primary local source of protein, and the most boring. You can spice it up all you want to but after a while beans is beans if you know what I mean. (I can eat beans and rice everyday. Â dt) The second source is seafood, but Dan does not care for seafood except for shrimp and I donÂt particularly enjoy digging out those little black parts. Which brings us to chickens.

There are chickens everywhere here. They definitely are free range. If you thought much about what these chickens eat, the value you place in your KFC stock would decline significantly. (AR, you must really come down for a visit.) These chickens eat rocks, dirt, ants, bugs - just about anything small enough to fit in their beaks. I have not discovered where they have their nests but I have seen them sleeping in the lower branches of trees. Every so often you see a hen with a bunch of chicks following her around. I canÂt think the survival rate for these chicks is very high considering all the dogs and cats that also free range around here. But I have never seen the chicks attacked.

Perhaps the Roosters protect them. There are many different kinds of Roosters here and they are quite colorful. There is a Rooster right down our street who is obviously modern in that he operates on Daylight Saving Time. He takes his duties quite seriously and begins crowing every morning about 4:45. This Rooster has a very healthy pair of lungs whatever the size of his brain may be. (Mexico adjusts time on 6 April; currently Jalisco is 2 hours behind Columbus. dt)

Roosters play a significant part in the art scene here. In fact Dan won a prize in a Dublin art show with one of his photos of a Bucerias rooster. I actually sold a little painting in a Bucerias art show I made of a fighting cock. It happened this way. I took a picture of this rooster and using the photo as a model painted a small sketch of him in oils. I did not particularly notice that this rooster had no comb. At the local art show a cock fighting aficionado was quite excited and bought the sketch. He told me you did not often see pictures of fighting cocks. It seems the combs are cut off the fighting cocks so that their opponents can not attack them there because it causes a lot of bleeding (We wouldnÂt want that, now would we!). (I think that cock fighting is actually illegal here but it goes on quite openly.) Luis offered to take me to a cockfight but I graciously declined. I guess my interest in the local culture does have its limits. But then I donÂt go to boxing matches in the US either.

I have no reservations about eating the locally cooked chickens. Almost every block has a little chicken place where they grill them over carbone fired in ½ of an oil barrel sliced lengthwise (or other creative contraptions  dt). We have had a chicken Âfamily meal every Sunday after church. It is invariably delicious. The family meal includes one whole chicken chopped into pieces, 2 servings of rice, 2 servings of cole slaw, 2 grilled onions, I bag of hot sauce, 4 tortillas, and 1 grilled green chili, all for 60 pesos (about $6). The chicken is grilled with an orange sauce which I think contains paprika among other things. One chicken is about 2 meals for Dan and me because the chickens are smaller and lack the breast augmentation we are used to in US birds. You can buy larger birds from the chicken man but he explained to me they are really capons. We do not know where the chickens come from. There must be a chicken farm  probably several - somewhere because the birds we see wandering around are not nearly enough to supply the local consumption. (We think over 1000 chickens are grilled in Bucerias everyday! And there are several regular chicken chains that mostly do rotisserie style.  dt) (Actually a lot of beef, pork, and turkey is also consumed here.  dt)

Americans and Canadians have come a long way from their roots when most farm families had their own chickens as a cheap source of meat and eggs. Many gringo children follow the chickens around not to mention the adults who paint and photograph them as if they were exotic. At Easter time here they were selling little chicks that had been dyed different colors. I can remember this from my childhood and I never quite understood it. Dan reported he saw one of these dyed chicks with a little baseball cap glued to its head. How odd!

Today because of Easter we had Hot Cross Buns; they were yummy!!

Happy Easter Everyone!

Dan and Rebecca

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