A trip to Chinatown

They have a Chinatown here. A delightful Chinatown, where you can get balls of squid on a sharp stick for about a dollar. Also, the grocery stores there sell peanut butter. Not that peanut butter is exactly Chinese, but maybe the conventional wisdom is that it's foreign, and therefore goes in the foreign section. We got two kinds, one that claimed to be "natural" and tasted like chalk and disappointment, and one that made no special claims and was perfectly serviceable. I've been missing the PB (or, PdeM, here. Pasta de Mani, in the Spanish). I'm quite pleased. We also got a couple dozen quail eggs, on account of their tininess. They taste really just like regular eggs, but so much more fun to make scrambles with!

The existence of a Chinatown here makes me wonder: if native Chinese speakers have enough trouble with English "r"s and "l"s, how do they navigate them in Spanish? I wanted to get somebody to say "perro," but it seemed kind of sadistic.

Speaking of perros, a few blocks outside C-Town in the semi-suburban section of Belgrano, some ASPCA type organization was giving away dogs. Sweet, adorable little dogs. I played with a little yellow puppy until John found me and led me back into Realityland, in which we A. cannot bring a dog back to the US and B. are not allowed dogs in our apartment even if we could and C. the dog was covered in tiny bumps and probably would have given us fleas or possibly leukemia. I of course had already named the puppy and now spend most of my time mourning poor Sr. Waffles. Oh, Sr. Waffles, I hope somebody else took you home. I actually had a dream about him the other night where just that very thing happened, and Sr. Waffles' new owner handed me a bag full of the bumps he'd had removed from the dog. I apologize, that's sort of gross, isn't it?