hipopótama hambrienta

As I write this, I am seated at my desk in my sunny upstairs room (which has a full view across the courtyard into the kitchen below). I am ostensibly doing homework, but unless my homework is downloading "The Lost Boys" on megavideo and listening to Carol King music (and writing a blog post), how much homework I am currently doing is debatable. Up until about 20 minutes ago, I was studiously reading, underlining, researching, and writing. What is it, then, that causes this change in my productivity by which I am afflicted every afternoon at around 3 PM? HUNGER.

Not that I ever go hungry here, as there is more food than I know what to do with and it is (often forcibly) readily available. The problem is that even if I wasn't hungry before, around 2:30 my host mom gets down to the preparation of the midday meal and the delicious smell begins to waft up through my open window until I am simply ravenous.

(Side note: Have I mentioned that my room is equipped with jalousie windows which never really close and have an inch-wide gap at both the top and the bottom? They're great for keeping a room fresh because they let in lots of air, along with lots of smells, both good and bad.)

The 45-minute wait between when the smells start and when we get to eat the deliciousness is excruciating. My host mom has to be the VERY BEST COOK in all of Puebla, and every meal is outstanding. While I'm sure that if I went downstairs and was like, "hey, I'm hungry" I would get a ton of snacks thrown at me, but I maintain this puritanical guilt about "ruining my appetite." Therefore, I suffer in non-productive silence.

Another interesting tidbit of information is that, while I said that we get cookin' around 2:30, that's just the actual assembly and frying (it's almost ALWAYS frying) of the food. Do not be deceived! My host mom has been preparing food since around 10 this morning, shopping for, washing, peeling, chopping, marinating, and doing various other delicious things to what invariably becomes another amazing culinary wonder from the kitchen of Alba Escudero y Uribe de Vallejo (who besides being an awesome cook has an awesome name).

Oh! I just got called to eat, so here I will leave you. Buen provecho!