Day 3 - Paint!

PAINT DAY! 

I'm so excited! Can't you tell?

 I hung out a bit until Diamond and Kate finally showed up.  We got painting almost immediately.  I had thought the yellow paint that I bought, called “Maíz”, was too dark and that I would mix the yellow and white paint.  I decided that could be disastrous, and that we could just try to paint it a bit normally and then see how we liked it.  We blasted some music from my laptop off my “Strut it out” playlist and had a great time chatting and painting and singing along. 

Before Picture

Diamond and Kate mid-paint

I got really lucky, because the paint was a great color, almost exactly the same color as my room at home, and one coat seemed to cover all the stains, the green paint showing through, and the ugly eggshell color.  It was so happy!  We painted the whole room in about an hour and a half.  

Painted walls - happy and bright!  Now about that trim...

Now that the room was painted, we took a break to wash the brushes and rest our arms.  Washing the brushes turned out to be a little bit harder than we had planned because I lose water at my house every day.  We usually don't have water from 9am to 4 pm, and I had to try and wash the brushes with some saved water in a bucket, which was really unsuccessful.  I did my best and then we started in on the trim.  Painting the trim of my room might have been the hardest paint job I've ever had, because it is filled with holes and is lumpy and bumpy and not a clear line across the wall.  It was hard to decide where to paint sometimes.  Miraculously, one coat of the white paint actually covered all the dark red.  I touched up everything later with a tiny brush and cap full of paint to make it perfect after Diamond and Kate went home.

Diamond and Me right after we finished painting my room! 

Ultimate Before and After Picture!

After that, we were called in for lunch, and we all ate together.  Halfway through lunch, Griseria asked us if we wanted to learn how to make Tamales.  Kate decided that we did, and the long and difficult process commenced. I really do have a whole new appreciation for tamales.   

First, we had to take big kernels of a certain type of corn and grind them to bits with the grinder my family has permanently hooked up to the end of the table.  Do not be fooled, this is HARD work.  Each of us would crap out after about ten rotations of this corn grinder.  At one point the top popped off and corn went flying everywhere, and other time it broke and wouldn't grind anything.  During this process we were all pretty sure that Griseria only asked us if we wanted to learn so that we would do the grinding for her because she made herself pretty scarce once she told us what to do.  So we grinded corn into floury stuff for about 40 minutes. 

Corn grinder = hard work. 

So we turned corn into this stuff.

      After we ground all that stuff up, Griseria took a huge hunk of the cheese she and Celina had made together and and broke it up into small chunks with her hands, adding a little bit of orange liquid (maybe hot saucy type stuff?).  We then got a bunch of corn husks and ripped off pieces of it, wiping out the dead bugs and spider webs, to then load up the floury stuff we had made and added water to.  It became an assembly line.  Get a husk, clean it out, fill it with the tamale dough stuff in a kind of rectangular pancake type shape, then add the orange-y cheese filling, then slam it together and fold it up.  

Griseria breaking up the cheese

Assembly Line putting together the tamales

      All in all, I was terrible at folding up the tamales and making them neat.  By the time that we had finished making all of them and it was time to cook them, Kate and Diamond had to leave.  We told Griseria that they needed to leave, and she pretty much told them that they couldn't.  I knew we needed to leave earlier so they could catch a mototaxi, which are really hard to come by, but Griseria insisted that there would be one and made them stay.  So we waited, about half an hour until the tamales were done steaming, and she packed up eight tamales for each of them.  I realized, about that time, that I was going to be eating tamales for every meal for a while.  

      We walked down to the little central hub to wait for a mototaxi, but none showed up.  They eventually decided they would just start walking.  They walked all the way to Chota because there was no mototaxi.  Not sure it was worth 8 tamales to them, but it was what it was.