An epic quest for cereal

Ok, we have now been in Ecuador for more than three weeks, and while we are having a good time, both Hanne and myself have been realy wanting a nice bowl of plane corn flakes for breakfast. While our host family always supplies a copius and elegent breakfast, there is some thing we have been missing about boring cold cereal.

However, getting cornflakes and milk here is a bigger operation then you might expect. here are the steps involved:

1) Buy the cereal.
There are quite a lot of very sweet foods here (all the bread, for instance), so I realy just wanted some unsweetend cornflakes or cheerios. While we are in Baños for a few days seemed like the perfect time to get our cereal, since we would not offend our host mom by not eating her homemade granola, which she, I am sure, would find much superior. So we went into the supermarket, only to discorver that there are no unsweetend cereals here. Almost all are types of cornflake or krispy rice, but not just plain. You can get them frosted with suger, sweetend condenced milk, strawberry flavor, chocolate, even honey. But not plain. We went for cornflakes with raisens, hopeing for something less sweet; it turned out to be frosted flakes (bad ones at that) with sugar coated raisens. Oh well...

2) Milk
You can´t just buy a cold thing of milk here. It is usualy sold in room tempurature bags or cartons, which don´t need to be refrigerated untill after being opened. Even then, you need to make sure its pasturized. To make it more complex, almost all the milk here is whole milk (which neither of us like very much) and doesn´t taste very good. The supermarket here in Baños sells one type of refrigerated, pasturized, low fat milk (actualy, it was thier only cold milk). It comes in a bag, which we opened with with my pocket knife, and then had to be held upright while we are, and sealed with a hairtie when done.

3) Bowls and spoons.
Remeber how we are in Baños? Well, that ment we had to buy bowls from the supermarket, as well as spoons, to eat our cereal with. I picked out some nice (cheep) flowered ceramic ones, as well as some cheep spoons, so now we have basic cutlery.

4) Eating it.
We ate our cereal on the roof of the hostel, were their is nice set of tables. There is a café, too, but they lack cereal and most of their food (eggs, toast, etc.) is served on plates. We ate up there and, apart from making a mess pouring our milk out of a bag, everything went pretty well. The hostel even let us put the leftover milk in their refrigerator.

In all, this operation involved 2 trips to the store over the course of two days, and the cereal was, by US standards, pretty bad. But, we arn´t in the US, we are in Ecuador. And we ate it, and it was good.