Saturday, December 28 – This morning Christi went out to scrub the bird poop shortly after sunrise, wanting to get it done before it was too hot out. She was horrified to see that the entire boat was covered with a strange ash. We’d noticed yesterday that directly north of us, possibly the next building over, there had been a steady stream of smoke. Apparently, it burned all night. We also found that more birds had come along and added to the collection. The newly deposited gifts were red in color. While they washed off easily, we were going to need to treat the spots with special cleaner to completely remove the discoloration. The baked-on older gifts took a fair amount of scrubbing to remove.  

Yesterday, Keith had wanted to order chilaquiles, but the restaurant was only serving lunch. This morning, Keith requested that we go back to the restaurant for breakfast today so he could get chilaquiles. 

There was no salsa service at breakfast. Instead, they brought out a slice of banana bread for each of us. Eric ordered what is a traditional breakfast food for this region: chicken tacos with the local mole sauce, which was served with rice and fried plantains. Mole is a savory sauce made with chocolate and chilis. Every region in Mexico has its own special spin on ingredients are used in the sauce, so there are many kinds of moles across Mexico. The menu indicated that this one was mildly spicy and had nuts. This mole was dark brown. The sauce was complex; Eric could identify peanuts and cinnamon, but he couldn’t figure out the other ingredients