Alejandro, of course, fed us Mexican cuisine; he loves to cook. We visited him twice.
The first time we ate tortillas with guacamole, if memory serves. A tortilla is a flatbread made from corn or wheat flour,
and then I'll quote Wikipedia, because it describes it perfectly.
Tortillas
The tortilla is the base for many dishes (mainly Mexican cuisine), for example, enchiladas, burritos, fajitas, tacos, quesadillas, where various fillings are wrapped in the flatbread. In addition, tortillas are often served instead of bread with other dishes (for example, with chili con carne). They serve as a base for pies, stuffed rolls, canapés and sandwiches. They are eaten fried or baked, served plain or rolled up and filled with stuffing. The filling can be savory as well as sweet. And crispy pieces are used as a garnish and to thicken soups. This flatbread replaces a fork, spoon, and knife for Mexicans — they use it to scoop up sauce or hold pieces of meat, and it's quite appropriate to eat this "cutlery" at the end of the meal. Since corn dough pastries harden quickly, all of this is invariably eaten piping hot.
Guacamole is an avocado-based sauce, invariably with lemon or lime juice. The latter is a citrus fruit similar to a lemon; I'd only tried it maybe once before then. Mexicans use lime widely in many dishes.
Guacamole
We didn't just eat the flatbreads on their own, but with soup. The soup itself wasn't particularly spicy. But the tortillas, used instead of bread, were drenched in sauce, and together it became rather fiery. Plus, you could sprinkle it all with chili or other spices from a shaker. The soup was similar to our chicken soup, just with beans, if I'm not mistaken. Fortunately, in terms of consistency, it didn't resemble American mush-soups in the slightest, which is why I liked it. Tortilla soup is delicious, I would eat it every day. But it's unhealthy because the flatbreads are fried, the sauce is spicy and quite caloric, just like the soup.
Then I also ate some watermelon. If you don't know how Mexicans eat watermelon, you know absolutely nothing about Mexicans. They sprinkle it with pepper, salt, and lime juice (which, by the way, somewhat neutralizes the heat of the pepper). Taste-wise, it's total pornography, of course — as my sister puts it, "ruining a watermelon for nothing."
I'm not slacking on the exotic stuff; diligently slathering my watermelon with pepper and chili
This was our first time having authentic Mexican food. Before this, we also ate an inauthentic burrito at a Taco Bell located in the Belvidere Oasis. The latter is a pseudo-Mexican food chain heavily adapted for Americans, which is why Alejandro doesn't like it. Taco Bell means "Taco" Bell, where the first word is once again our old friend the tortilla, only this time in the form of a sandwich.
There are 5845 Taco Bell restaurants in the US
And a burrito is a sealed wheat flour tortilla with a filling of minced meat, beans, tomatoes, and so on. At Taco Bell they put sour cream and ketchup in it, which I'm not a fan of, and the beans are too overpowering, unlike in the soup. Basically, I can't say I liked it, but that's for the best — no need to get used to fast food. We also drank a smoothie there. Lingvo translates this as "gallant cavalier", but that's not our case; we'd translate it more like "mishmash" or "pulpy-thing". In reality, it's just a sweet chilled drink made of finely blended fresh and frozen fruit, sometimes with milk or yogurt, but always with finely crushed ice. Our mango and strawberry drink tasted repulsive — even my sister didn't like it, even though she's basically an American already. And this despite the seller recommending it to us as tasty. I don't think he consciously lied for the sake of a measly dollar — more likely he actually thought so.
A burrito — the filling is tightly wrapped, and this is important
At Six Flags we ate fajitas, which is yet again just a wheat flatbread with filling, but unlike the previous types, here theoretically you have to choose yourself from what is laid out on the table. Obviously, buying it at a kiosk you can't really choose much, except maybe one of three types of ready-made filling, and whether to put sour cream on the pancake. Alejandro and I don't like sour cream, so they didn't put it on ours. The fajita at Six Flags differed from other flatbread dishes only in that the flatbread wasn't wrapped all the way, but they just piled the filling in the middle, kind of like you'd do yourself if you were eating it at a table. In any case, the dish was tasty and moderately spicy (to the degree of "Americans don't complain"), so I liked it. A fajita is not quite a Mexican dish, but rather what is called Tex-Mex. This means Mexican cuisine Americanized by Texas cowboys. We actually recently had a chain restaurant open in Daugavpils with exactly this name — Tex Mex. I haven't been there, but I'd go; if anyone else wants to go, drop me a line.
Fajitas filling
The second time, we had dinner and hung out with Alejandro's relatives and friends. For example, with a cool guy named Aberardo, who told us how by working two full-time jobs he earned $80,000 in a few years, and used this money to build a house in Mexico, where he lived with his girlfriend and mom for some time. Then he returned to the US, where he finished night school to boost his competitiveness, and later dragged his pregnant (at 9 months) wife across the border, where she successfully gave birth to a baby. More details are friend-locked at my sister's, alas.
Abe, as they say on Lepra, is kewl, because he's skinny, wears glasses, doesn't drink, and strives to get a better education, which he actually puts some effort into. He also knows English, math, and computers well, which is a rare phenomenon for a Mexican. On the other hand, Aberardo is a supporter of the traditional domestic order and patriarchy, which actually isn't rare for a Mexican. Jorge, by the way, doesn't know English at all, even though he works two jobs, including at McDonald's. Naturally, this limits his employment options to positions where you don't have to talk to customers, like the kitchen.
In the evening, we ate flatbreads with filling and salsa. Later, Alejandro also grilled some meat in a cool, delicate orange sauce, not like our endless vinegars. Americans, by the way, never make shashlik — it takes too long and is inconvenient; instead, they grill their meat.
Green and red salsas. The first time we ate green, the second time — red.
Let's get back to our flatbreads. Salsa is simply the name for any sauce, but in American English, it rather means something based on chili and tomatoes. This time the sauce turned out so hellishly spicy that even Alejandro's friend Jorge couldn't handle it and went to rinse out his mouth. But I endured it, because you've got to experience the exotic properly, after all. I have to say, it was the spiciest thing I have eaten in my life — to the point that even tears were flowing. Now in Latvia I can boldly eat the spiciest food everywhere — nothing will compare to the fieriness of authentic Mexican cuisine anyway.