Hooks in You

I´ve been pre-advised that Santa Cruz is a big city without any individual merit. I´m stuck here for at least half a day, so I start my normal process.

My highlight is a random turn from a street market, to find an indoor meat market. This is what I imagined and hoped for from Montevideo´s meat market. It´s a long room with white tiled booths. Running the length atop the booths is a metal bar, from which each booth has twenty hooks. Red meat of all shapes and sizes are hooked up. One stall has three big tongues hanging down. That inspires me to invent the game "what´s that meat". I continue up and down the three rows of booths trying to discern which part of the animal I´m looking at. I can name tripe, eyes, hearts and lungs and hooves and trotters. There´s another big-eared pig head. This one is upside down and the pig is smiling, probably pleased with what he´s died for.

Outside the market, old women are selling whole chickens. The chickens are plucked and their bodies are a bright yellow and they have the red trim on their heads. They fondly remind me of the rubber chicken from the classic 1991 adventure game, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck´s Revenge. I look forward to, once again, outwitting Largo LaGrande and LeChuck once again, on my return.

Farther into town, on the street, I enjoy to gander at a cage of geese - (intended) - and chickens. I´m surprised when I look up, not to find a butcher, but a pet store.

I also pop into the Sony store. Home Hifi´s out here still sell on the principle of "the bigger the better". It amuses me because it would amuse my father, who spent much of the seventies in Kenya indulging the same principle at great cost.

In the afternoon, I´m on a fifteen hour bus ride to Sucre. I manage to sleep. In my dream, I´m in a classroom on a chair with wheels, one of which has a lump on it. For some reason I´m paralysed, and the chair is rolling and juddering around the room, out of my control. I wake up to find the juddering remains as the bus is crawling over terrible dirt roads. And this time, there´s no fried chicken.