Bon Appétit

I would have to estimate that I think about food about 70% of the day (I’m hungry a lot). Admittedly, I’m not imagining myself eating Rwanda food, because really, it’s nothing to write home about. Despite that…I’m writing home about it.

The food here is probably just as delicious as you can imagine it being. One of the things I’ve become accustomed to eating (AKA it’s what’s for supper everyday) is agatogo. Agatogo is a stew made from ibitoki, a kind of rock hard, unripe banana that’s sticky to the touch. After peeling with a knife you basically boil the bananas into a mush. It looks like [vomit]. Tastes like [vomit+bananas]. Also, it costs about as much as [vomit], that is to say, its costs almost nothing. One bowl of agatogo and you won’t need to eat for the rest of the day, it’s basically glue in the stomach. It also means you can expect to have a bowel movement about once every four days. When I first began eating it, it really made me gag, but I’ve seemed to develop a certain affinity for it. Now, I have to make a confession here, my roommate and I have a cook. She is an old lady and we refer to her as the umuceceru {old lady}. Now before you think that I’m heartless, please realize that she asked us to call her that. She cooks agatogo every night, and does my laundry because no matter what I will never be able to wash clothes in a bucket with one cup of water. Together we pay her about a dollar a day, which I’ve been told is overpaying.

Admittedly, eating agatogo all of the time can do some seriously crazy things to the digestive tract, so we also spice it up a bit. Sometimes we eat rice. If you are feeling real ambitious you can put beans on the rice. If you are crazy you can also crush peanuts and make a delicious peanut sauce. We were eating mushrooms for a while, but it turns out that the man who cultivates them decided he could make a lot more money being a moto taxi driver. Sometimes we buy macaroni and I make macaroni with tomato sauce, but whenever I decided to cook I have to put up with dirty looks from the umuceceru, so I usually cave and let her take over. One time, she caught me cooking for myself and threatened to not come back…so…I’ve stopped doing any household chores.

Now I have to admit, the food isn’t all bad, which brings me to the exciting part of this discussion…bar food! Bars in Rwanda aren’t like the kind back home. They are mostly large empty rooms filled with plastic furniture, lit by a single fluorescent bulb that is usually flickering on and off, and full of drunk abasaza {old men}. The beers are warm, the peanuts stale, but just like America they are great places to meet up with friends, have a few laughs, be harassed by host country nationals, and eat some food.

The typical bar food in Rwanda are brochettes and chips. Brochettes are very similar to the kebabs that you would eat back in America. They are essentially sticks of goat meat, rubbed up and down with spices and piri piri pepper (or as Rwandans say: pelee pelee), then thrown onto an open fire. Sometimes they are delicious and you can’t believe God could be so good to you, sometimes they come and the meat is a little overcooked but you eat them anyway because, hey, it’s not agatogo. But sometimes…sometimes you spend more time trying to discern what part of the goat they gave you than you do actually eating. Usually, if the meat looks this gross, it tastes even worse. When a bar does this I put them on my bar ‘shit list,’ and make sure to avoid them like the plague. Brochettes are usually accompanied very well with a plate of chips. For about $1.25 you get a giant plates of French fries, a salad of raw onions, and a huge slab of mayo. It’s so good you can cry.

Disclaimer: I feel like I should point out that, would I ever be served this type of food in a bar in America I would probably find it all very disgusting. But here…I’m just that hungry.

My new favorite type of bar food is akabenzi, you may know it better as pork, commonly understood to be the most delicious of all meats. One of my favorite bars serves a ‘pork platter.’ For roughly $3.00, you get a giant platter filled will deep fried potatoes and spices, topped with ONE KILO OF AKABENZI, and the icing on this cake: raw onions. It’s delicious and the perfect meal for a couple of people. Just don’t expect to get much work done the next day; it has the opposite effect of agatogo (see above).

Of course, all of these foods need a nice beverage to compliment their flavors. Primus is, in many ways, the national beer of Rwanda. It’s been around for a while and .75 liters only costs a dollar. Of course you can sometimes down three of these and then you stop to think that holy crap I just drank over two liters of beer! Yeah, the next morning is not a fun one. I also like Mützig, similar to Primus but a little sour tasting sometimes. And my favorite is Turbo King. The posters call it the Alcohol for Men, so ladies, ordering on of these puppies will bring about so discriminating looks. It’s a darker beer (a nice change change from Primus, which tastes like Bud Light with a rusty nail in the bottom), and has an alcohol content of about 7%. A few of these and you will be real goofy, but be aware before you order that the bartender is going to have a new one on the table and uncapped as soon as you finish the one in front of you.

The longer I’ve been here I realize each day is a new adventure and I still have so much more to learn about this amazing country. Except the food. I feel like I can pretty much say I’ve had it all and now I’m ready for a Big Mac.