Friday, December 22, 2006

Another rainy day in Pucon

What shall we do on a rainy day in Pucon? We were offered opportunities to go enjoy the great outdoors, but decided to hope for better weather "soon".

It became a trip planning day, and we spent our time poring over schedules for buses and flights, and looking through books for interesting places to stay along the way. After a while, the effort of deciphering Spanish websites created an appetite (or perhaps just a need for a change), and we decided to try the highly recommend ¡ecole! restaurant next door.

Our first impression....Wow! Well done! We liked the "home kitchen" ambiance and taste! It's the kind of place where you can really eat after a full day of energenic play: good presentation, hearty food, and (most importantly) enough of it. What a find! The traveller's tip is to get the cheapest item on the menu ($2 for a small salad) and see if they'll serve it with their standard basket of homemade bread (5 warm, thick-cut slices), butter, and salsa. You could live on that stuff -- we're convinced. (And we're in the process of demonstrating it...) We don't quite know why they deliver salsa with the bread, but we're starting to think the two taste pretty good together. And the FOOD....where do I start! I (Jolene) had a salad with chips, black beans, cheese, lettus, tomatoe, avacado and olives. It looked medium sized, but it was very filling and in the end it was definately a meal sized salad. Case had stir-fried vegetables over brown rice served with a fresh side salad!
And the menu isn't just one or two items -- there is such a variety that we found it hard to choose. We both feel we'll be eating there many times over the next week.

Still no sight of the fabled volcano that (so they tell us) looms over the town. The clouds have been hanging so low that, without a map, we wouldn't know which direction to look for it!

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