We were on the point of leaving a little cafe in Nazca after our so-so meal when we spotted someone eating an interesting-looking Singapore Laksa-type dish (something noodle-like in a bright orange red soup base), so we asked him for the name for future reference. He told us it was sopa minuta. Felt quite pleased with ourselves for having done a clever thing like that as we had always been too shy about asking and ended up not being to order a dish we’d liked on sight on a previous occasion, and looked forward to trying it out for ourselves at the next town. Once there, we duly ordered a sopa minuta. What arrived was an anaemic-looking dish: white without the noodle stuff. We told the waiter he’d brought us the wrong order, and that we’d ordered sopa minuta. He said, yes, this is sopa minuta. It turned out that “sopa minuta” (literally "soup minute"?) only meant something like “soup of the day”.
(Peru, 1986)
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