Jujuy seems like a sleepy town, quite literally. At 1pm every day, all the stores and businesses seem to close down for the afternoon siesta or whatever and most don't open again until 17:30 - 18:00 later on. Try getting lunch at 1 o'clock! At least the local supermarket stays open during the downtime, and the helado (ice cream) kiosks. (The picture on the left is taken at roughly 15.30 and is of the main street. Not much happening here...)The first night in Jujuy, we decided to go for the Argentinian experiance of a parrillada - or mixed grill as some would call it. Now, after the actually experiencing it, I call it 3 pigs and a cow. For the princly sum of 46 (girls) and 48 (boys) argentine pesos (£7.70), we got a starter salad with bread, fries, ice cream for desert and the actual parrillada.
But what does that mean I can hear you ask... well, when the first plate of meat came which contained one beef steak and one pork steak and a blood sausage (no thank you), we though "well, we were expecting a bit more than this but with everything else, I guess this is ok". Oh no! As soon as we finished that plate, the waiter came with a board with two more cuts of meat on it. After depositing them on our plate and wandering off, Johan and I looked at each other and wondered how we would get through this plate as well. Well, when in Rome... we thought and tucked in. As soon as we managed to work our way through that plate, another arrived. At this point we were getting a little concerned about our stomach's ability to absorb so much meat, especially me who had been eating vegetarian for the last month after Cusco... We tried out best on the third plate but the waiter finally noticed our struggle and came over to inquire if we were ok. When we finally communicated our question about how much was left to come, he rattled off a string of about 5 different cuts of meat that we had not yet sampled. After agreeing to the tiniest chorizo to finish we sat back and pondered our situation.
How can it be that people regularly eat like this and manage to stay healthy? Or maybe they are not but you cannot tell... by and large, the people around us don't look obease or sickly so perhaps they just have a different constitution from us. Maybe the entire nation has been on a type of Atkins diet from the start and actually it should be called the Argentine diet. Who knows. All I know is that we ate vegetables the next day and most of the one after that!
In fact, we were in our local vegetarian restaurant munching on a salad roll which passed for a vegetarian sandwich for lunch when we heard the banging of drums. At first we thought that the music in the restaurant had changed, but then we sensed some commotion outside. Ignoring the not-so-tasty roll and grabbing our cameras, we went out to look. Outside was a small carnival troupe dancing and performing through the streets. We didn't even know that there was a festival going on in Jujuy but there is was, happening right in front of us. Pretty cool.
Later in the evening, while searching for some
dinner, again we heard the now familiar drums and this time there were several troupes, one after another, walking through the streets. Along with the conventional, scantily clad women, there were some more interesting costumes...I wonder if this trend will continue in Salta (tomorrow) and throughout the rest of Argentina? What fun :)
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