Me ENCANTAN paches!

Had a really busy work week but managed to throw in some yoga with Gianluca, vinitos y quesos con Michelle y Geraldina, dinner with Lety (and Gianluca), giggling with Sonia, some mercado and farmacia adventures (necesito un laxante, por favor!), absolutely atrocious Spanish conversations with Catarina (y Lore y Lety y Sonia y Fernando y Angel, y los payasos en la casa, Marcos y Petra y coffee shop chicas y tour operadores y todos) and some Saturday night jazz with Stef and the two Fernandos.

Yesterday afternoon, after roaming around Xela in the sunshine, running errands, desperately searching for paches, I came back to make some lunch (leftover greek chicken quesadillas) and found Catarina, the house manager (I’m sure she is commonly referred to as a maid, but this woman does EVERYTHING here) scrubbing something.  She is constantly washing or ironing or hanging, running back and forth to the restaurant with baskets of napkins and mantellas balanced on her head.  Now that’s what I call busy.  Anyway, I made her one of my weird quesadillas and started annoying her with a rundown of my morning quest of running around Xela looking for paches.

Paches (pah-chays) are either glutinous rice or potato steamed in banana leaves with a chunk of some kind of seasoned meat in the middle and sometimes sport a random, surprise prune.  I think my teacher last year told me that there’s only one with a prune per batch and it’s supposed to mean luck or something.  Needless to say, I love them and will soon be shaped like a pache, but I can’t always find them.  Last week in the market I followed the sound of a woman yelling pache pache pache pache and gobbled one up on my way home, banana leaves flying everywhere, because I was so excited to find one and just couldn’t wait to see what was inside.  No prune.  Yesterday, I searched through two markets asking women with mysterious covered baskets, tiene paches?  No.  There are handwritten signs around town on locked up doors promising paches on certain days of the week, but I tend to forget where they are or get there a day too late.

Well my Spanish must have been somewhat intelligible, because Catarina understood and told me about a woman who sits on a corner close to our house with a basket of paches.  But only on Saturday.  And only until 5pm.  Well that’s what I thought she said.  I am a source of constant amusement to all non-English speakers who can’t clarify in English what they’ve said to me in Spanish when they see that befuddled look on my face.  She was giving me directions to some corner and she really may as well have been speaking Latvian.  I only hear the first part of any set of directions, regardless of the language, everything after that gets mixed up.  And in this case, it was “esquina“.  Oh sure I heard abajo and cerca and una cuadra and un parque pequenito, but I don’t remember the order and the hand gestures that accompany most directions just confuse me even more.

Anyway I went to grab my bag any way and thought if I was lucky I’d hear the faint cry of pache pache pache and be able to find her that way.  Catarina saw how excited I was and asked “donde vas?” and I said “por paches por supuesto” and she just started laughing “no a las cinco, a las cinco“, putting up four fingers on one hand and her thumb on the other.  What was she babbling about?  Yo sé, yo sé, I have to get there before five…and it was already three, and I had to fit in some wandering-around-lost time.  No…apparently the pache lady is there AT five.  Until 8.  And only on Saturday.

So I waited until 5:30 and went the correct abajo way (there are two ways to go abajo from the house, and in general 9 out of 10 times, I would choose the wrong one)…she was literally a block away, on a corner I pass three or four times a day and then I laughed at the length and breadth of the conversation it took to get me here.

I love buying street food.  And this even felt like a little illegal.  Her sitting on something unidentifiable under her colorful skirts, me sidling up to the basket and looking both ways and almost whispering “tiene paches“.  Her wary, hesitant “si” and then the covert transaction of me handing over 16Q from my baby change purse and her unveiling a basket full o’ paches and extracting dos papas y dos arroz.  Four meals for about $2.25.  The one I had last night was potato and I think chicken…and it was delicious.

But no prune.