Due to our choice of adding a couple nights in Sucre, we had to switch hostels at noon, with plans to go to the museum in the afternoon. We had an easygoing morning at the hostel and heated up some of our leftover soup with avocado for lunch before we switched to our new hostel. Some time during the morning, I realized that the museum is closed on Mondays… We had also needed (direly) to get some laundry done, so we packed up our laundry and headed to the Lavanderias that we had seen everywhere around town… except today we encountered them to be: closed… closed… closed… OPEN! But they are too busy to do our laundry today… closed… Turns out that today is also a huge holiday, so almost everything was closed. We were told that it would be worse tomorrow, so we decided to put off laundry until Uyuni. Unfortunately the museum would never happen during our stay either.
Since we struck out on planned activities, we did some wandering around town and went to try some Chicha at a locals bar. (We had stopped here on our guided tour, but at that point they were out of Chicha!). Chicha is a fermented corn beverage made differently according to local customs in different countries in South America. The one we found was apparently pretty young, only aged for 10 days. It was served in a very interesting container! Not our favorite drink, but we were glad we tried it.
After that, we headed to Boca del Sapo for a cooking class!
Our instructor explained about all of the local ingredients that we would be using to make Mondongo for our main dish, along with llawa, a spicy sauce, and Mocachinchi, a peach infused drink. The Mondongo was a combination of pork ribs and tenderloin in a sauce made of red peppers, onion, garlic, and broth.
We also made a side of mote, which is similar to hominy that was seasoned with pork skin, turmeric, cumin, salt, and pepper. The llawa had tomato, green onion, an herb that we hadn’t seen before, and a spicy pepper. We used the equivalent of a gigantic mortar and pestle to make the llawa- it was pretty impressive.
The Mocachinchi consisted of dehydrated peaches soaked in water overnight, heated with sugar, then cooled. Everything was amazing (if we do say so ourselves!). We had a great time too!
Travel Fun With Cassie and Alejandro 