Minor (social) cultural shockwaves

People, who don't want to spoil their whole evening by sitting around with their hosts, will ask for a to-go plate for their dessert.

Similarly, it is often expected to carry home a heaping plateful of food for the husband or wife who didn't want to join you for dinner.

I have learned the hard way that if I am going to give someone some food to put it on a paper plate. It seems that if you give someone cake wrapped up on your best china plate, they consider that your plate is a gift to them as well. After more than a month, I had to go ask a neighbor for my plate back!

There is a reason why the custom is that the food is plated and served to guests instead of serving buffet style. At one gathering I had 6 pounds of fajita meat for 12 guests. The first guest put about 3 pounds of meat on his plate.

A friend told me about putting bottles of liquor out for people to help themselves at a party. They did − some uninvited guests carried a quart size bottle of liquor to their table and finished it off. The same thing happened to me with bottles of wine − an uninvited guest and his girlfriend finished off every bottle I opened and then asked me for more. They could barely stand up or talk at the time.

Many people arrive at parties hours late, eat or drink everything in sight and leave immediately.

Guests are routinely two or more hours late to any function, even weddings or a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner. If you are invited for 7 p.m., don't go at 7 p.m. or you will be the only one there for the first hour.

It is not unusual for late wedding guests to make loud entrances while the bride, who has already postponed the actual ceremony for two hours waiting for the guests to arrive, is walking down the aisle.

A party or wedding invitation is assumed to mean that the invitee can bring along everyone from his next door neighbor to their distant cousins from out of town.

Be prepared!

Buying old stuff at the new stores

I've done a little ranting about the "old stuff" that somehow ends up in the stores in Honduras here and here. I'd really like to know what is going on. It can't just be a coincidence or bad inventory control. The stores in La Ceiba are more likely to run out of things than to have an over-supply of inventory. Sometimes some stores are out of things like sugar, coffee, flour − things that are produced in Honduras!

These are some things I bought at a couple of different stores on Friday, March 10, 2007.


I remember buying cream cheese in the U.S. and the expiration date always being around 6 to 9 months away. It amazed me that it could possibly last that long.


In case you can't read it, this one expires March 31, twenty days from now.



Canned vegetables have years of life! I never used to even check the expiration dates. Why bother? Here in La Ceiba, I have to check the dates on EVERYTHING! These diced tomatoes expire June 6, 2007.

Wow! A three month shelf life. That really puts a damper on my stocking-up method of shopping.


Starbucks Frappuccino − I am a recovering addict of the real thing at the corner Starbucks stores, so I didn't buy the bottled stuff often in the U.S. When I did, though, I seem to recall the expiration date being a surprising year away. We have to drink these within the next 30 days.

(Living in Honduras, with no Starbucks, is a good place to get over a Frappuccino addiction − I had to go cold turkey here until some of the stores started importing this bottled Frappuccino.)

I wanted to buy dry yeast but the store only had huge pound-size packages of Red Star yeast and they all had an expiration date of May 2007. I think it would take me at least a year, maybe two, to use a pound of yeast at one or two teaspoons per loaf of bread.

I thought I remembered that the expiration date was usually a year or two away, although the real expiration depends upon keeping it refrigerated as it loses life in the heat and humidity. Sure enough, I checked my almost-used smaller package of yeast at home. It was manufactured in May 2006 and expires in May 2008.

So, what is going on here? When manufacturers or stores have aging products do they sell them to exporters who sends them down to Central America? If so, that's pretty shoddy!

If you have some of these things in your kitchen right now, please go look up the expiration date and tell us in a comment when they expire and what country you are in.

La Gringa's email subscribers

For those of you (50 of you! ♥ ) who receive La Gringa's Blogicito by email from Feedburner, I wanted to point out a new feature. At the end of each article, you will see a link to "comment." Clicking on that link will take you directly to the comment section on my blog for that particular article where you can read the other reader comments and/or make a new comment. Sometimes the email updates go out before there are any comments but if it is a topic of particular interest to you, you might want to check back later to see what others have said.

While it is always nice to receive emails from La Gringa readers, posting your comments on my blog often spurs further conversation among the readers which is a good thing! I promise you that I do read all the comments and generally respond to all of them. So try it out! Click on "comment" below and drop me a line.

Normally the articles look pretty much just like they do on the blog, but the last few articles which have had so many photos are not arranged very neatly in the email update. There doesn't seem to be a way to arrange photos so that they are in the same place on the email as they are on the blog. If the email looks all jumbled up to you, just click on the article title and it will take you that article on the blog, where hopefully it will look a little tidier.

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