Sorry, but I hate quesillo

Quesillo!

I started HATING quesillo cheese yesterday. I have never been a big fan, but yesterday my loathing sort of peaked. I guess it means I am ready to go home.

Quesillo is basically string cheese. Curds are somehow stretched into a long, inch-wide, rubbery belt. It is then wound round and round into a ball, which is sold by size. The smallest are tennis-ball size and the biggest are like soccer balls.

The cheese is kind of flavorless and hard to chew. It never really melts. It takes me forever to get down, and now that I have begun to despise it, it is a challenge to make myself eat it.

I got a huge slab of it on my sandwich at lunch yesterday. I was at a Cafe la Olla, so after I began kind of gagging, I peeled it off and put it aside.

Last night I got home and Gloria made me dinner - a squash blossom enchilada with guess what - quesillo! I guess Oaxacans never get tired of it.

I ate as much as I could. At one point, Gloria took coffee upstairs to Norman and I quickly pulled off the quesillo and stuffed it in the bottom of the trash, because she HATES to waste food and I didn't want to upset her by rejecting the dinner she had made. When she came back down, I was eating like I had never gotten up.

I feel bad because people here don’t waste food, but yikes, I can’t face quesillo anymore!

The handcrafts here are so amazing and beautiful and clever. People make the most beautiful objects out of the simplest materials - palm leaves, plastic strips, embroidery. It is all incredibly labor intensive and at the same time so common. You become jaded, seeing so much of it, over and over.

Like those dresses with the giant embroidered psychedelic flowers, the kind Frida Kahlo liked. They are so stunning. The first time I saw one I just stopped in my tracks. I had never seen anything so spectacular.