Mmmm...

My food addiction...

Breakfast
Breakfast usually consists of two of the following:

• Yogurt: strawberry, peach, vanilla, or chirimoya flavored. They have the best yogurt here – so creamy and smooth with rich fruit flavors. Mmm.
• Cereal. I’ve only had one kind of cereal here - Quaker “Quadritos de avena” (oat squares). It is so good and filling. I think it's even good for you.
• Round, flat bread rolls with thin slices of cheese, turkey, or salami inside.
• Clementines

Snack
Usually I grab a snack at school between classes since they eat lunch so late here. They have a small store in the university building and I normally have Pan con queso (a roll with cheese slices inside), yogurt, or I try a random candy bar or cookie. Otherwise, I walk outside to the corner where a guy fries and sells sopapillas and empanadas con queso from his cart. Sopapillas are yellow fried dough circles with absolutely no nutritional value. I don’t care, though – they’re good. And cheap (100 pesos=20 cents).

Lunch
Three days out of the week, I eat lunch at Mackay with all the teachers before working with the kids. It’s the best school food I’ve ever had. It’s more like a restaurant than a cafeteria. There’s usually fish, turkey or chicken with rice or potatoes. There’s also a salad buffet of beets, ensalada chilena (tomatoes and onions), and celery. Those three vegetables are the main components of salad here, which is drizzled with olive oil - this is one thing that I haven’t fully embraced. I miss lettuce and unhealthy salad dressing!

Supper
For supper, I eat a lot of chicken, potatoes, rice, and soup. My favorite meal has been a noodle dish that reminds me of chicken alfredo. I also really like this tuna/noodle concoction – I probably would have gagged at the thought of this a month ago. I have a roll, clementines or a banana, and juice with every meal. We never eat supper at the table. I always get it delivered to me in my room on a tray. Lunch is the only meal that we eat at the table for.

Drinks
Since I don’t drink coffee, tea, or soda, I basically live off of juice. I have tried apple, pineapple, peach, strawberry, orange and raspberry juice so far. My favorite juice is strawberry, but everything is so rich and pulpy and good. I don’t know how I’m going to go back to drinking U.S. juice – it’s fake! I have noticed the biggest difference between U.S. and Chilean apple juice. As you know, U.S. apple juice is yellowish and clear. Chilean (real) apple juice is opaque, pulpy and almost like pineapple juice in color. It looks like it actually came from, you know, an apple. I don’t drink a lot of milk here - usually only with cereal. I have tried milk in cartons at school. The chocolate was really good but the strawberry was too sweet for me.

Desserts
Desserts are nonexistent at home. My family is uber healthy and the closest thing I’ve had to a treat here is a small piece of pound cake for breakfast once. So I sneak in cookies or grab a pastry on my way home from school. I can’t live without sweets! Today I went to a chocolate store and tried a few different kinds of bars of chocolate. One was white chocolate with small pieces of cherries in it. It was indescribably perfect, but my favorite dessert here is still ice cream. I go to Bravissimo and try a new flavor every time I’m at the mall – as of today, my new favorite is Nutella.