Cartagena de Indias: More Tasty Flavours

And talking of fish, how about this splendid specimen, fresh from the Caribbean into the frying pan? He’s called a Mojarra, and comes fried with a spicy sauce of onions and peppers, together with coconut rice (don’t ask us why it’s quite so brown…), a whole banana which has been flattened and fried, and a nice salad. All this was preceded by an inoffensive chicken soup on the Menu del Dia (which here is also known as the Corrientazado) and makes an exceptionally cheap but tasty almuerzo. For 8,000 Pesos (this really isn’t much, the exchange rate is running at 2,990 this week)…


Breakfast just a few hours earlier (ok, hands up, we had a lie-in…) was mainly shakes, at (believe it or not) our new local, which has turned out to be better and even cheaper than the trusty old Bolivar. Can you tell the difference here between raspberry milkshake, orange juice and a carrot shake?


Later in the afternoon it was time to cool off. In this heat, all appetite seems to evaporate and all you want to do is to hydrate. And this is the best method in the world… and the tastiest. Now one of these shakes is the most amazing lemonade we’ve ever tasted, and the other is a mystery flavour, selected from the menu for its fascinating name and the fact that we hadn’t tried it yet. Can you guess what it is? Why not post a comment and get the discussion going?!


Right now Cartagena is staging a massive exhibition of the work of Miguel Morales. We stumbled into his exhibition space as he was hanging his latest canvases; we had a chat and he took a photo of us admiring his massive paintings. Here is a small sample of his work, but sadly we haven’t quite had time to return again to the exhibition.