¿Donde esta mi Ceviche?

OK, so I know you´re all wondering what happened to the food! Don´t worry...we´ve got the whole scoop, the whole giant spoon, too. After traipsing around all morning we all were feeling a bit peckish, so we went downtown to a Cevicheriá called Marcelo´s. Wow! This is what was out in front:

It´s a cart piled high with conchas (shells) and the guy on the left uses a little guillotine type device to split them, then puts them into the bowl (center) and then another guys sluices the tasty bits into the bowl...where they are then destined to become lunch.

There´s Robert, tearing into his bowl while mine sits (for the moment) untouched. At first when we were inside, I thought that they had squid ceviche, since a lot of people had bowls with ceviche...but the lime juice was black. Then, I find out it´s from the color of the conchas we´d seen outside. I´m not as much on the bivalve ceviche, and was debating whether I should change my order...but when my order came, they´d made a mistake. Instead of shrimp and oyster ceviche, I got oysters and conchas. I didn´t have to send it back. Susan got the fish and shrimp ceviche, and I figured that we could share back and forth, but she wasn´t so keen on the conchas. Hmm. They were a little tougher than the shrimp, but quite tasty. Wow!

As a small note, ceviche is a seafood dish that´s comprised of different types of seafood that aren´t cooked, but rather marinated in lime juice. In addition to various spices, onions are almost always added, along with tomato and cilantro. Susan wasn´t paying attention to her camera duties for a couple of minutes (she´s in charge of all the culinary action shots, you know) and by the time she came to, from swooning over her own succulent bowl of maritime delights, the bowl was nearly gone.

Thank god for the fast-action, high speed camera, or this mesmerizing scene might have been lost.

After lunch, we were set loose on the streets with the intention of resting a bit, before dinner. We, of course, had nothing to wear. After trying to find somewhere to buy some presentable clothes for a while...and time drawing near for dinner...we took the drastic action of asking a random woman on the street if she knew where two backpackers could find decent clothes for a dinner invitation. She said to go to Policentro. It sounded a little scary, but we thought about it. After another person also told us to go there, we did. We took a taxi.

We were in the midst of a full-on, Western style shopping frenzy! The mall was as modern as any we´d seen, and we found a fantastic little boutique where Susan found some lovely clothes. The prices were outrageous in Ecuadorean standards, but just the same as back home, in DC. A trip to one of the anchor stores in the mall paid off with a nice white shirt for me, too. The nice taxi driver for the ride home agreed to wait for us while we ran upstairs and changed and ran back down and then dashed off to the restaurant. Susan discovered the ploy of having him wait as soon as we got upstairs and I said, ¨OK, hurry! He´s waiting!¨ Here´s a picture of us on the way. Susan looked fantastic.

This is the fantastic place we went for dinner with the Mifex staff:

They had a giant grill inside where they grilled too many things to count. I took lots of pictures, but only posted one picture of the actual food...the one on the far right. That´s Luis, slicing off a healthy portion of an entire filet mignon. It didn´t fit on the skillet. It was cooked perfectly. I´m sorry. I have to stop now. I just can´t go on...