It's my first weekend in Santiago, Chile, and my friends and I are at the plaza near my house, trying to buy helado (ice cream). This may sound like an easy task, but there are so many varieties, and most of them are Spanish words that none of us recognize! There are brightly-colored fruit flavors, vainilla and chocolate (you can probably guess what those are), and many different types of manjar. What on earth is manjar?
Deciding to be adventurous, I order a double scoop of manjar con chocolate (manjar with chocolate) and cautiously take my first bite. It's delicious! I also know exactly what manjar is now: It must be a different name for dulce de leche, a sweet, caramel-like substance that I loved when I was in Argentina.
When I first ate dulce de leche during my homestay in Buenos Aires, I was very hesitant. Many of the foods that my Argentine mother served were very different from what I was used to in the United States, and I had already tried "dulce de leche" flavored ice cream back home and hated it!
