Pablito's Bar - Here Comes the Sun

Hola! Como esta? Estoy aprendiendo espanol! No hablo muy bien y solamente un pochito. Probably wrong. Basically (if you haven't already put this in Babel Fish or speak spanish) - Hi! How are you? I'm learning to speak spanish! I don't speak very well and only a very little. Last night at Pablito's, I asked the waiter if I could have the sun! Yo soy tonto...! (I am an idiot). I meant to say sal (salt) but I said sol (sun). He very sweetly brought me the sun. The people are muy accommodating here!! Anyway, back to Pablito's Bar...our spanish teacher Leni told us there is a saying that if you haven't been to Pablito's, you haven't really been to Samara. We thought if we were going to "be" here for a month and not really "be" here, that would be kind of stupido. Leni (and our dentist Paul) said we had to have the Olla de Carne there, which comes free with your beer. So we trekked down main street, turned at the Century 21, went on down the road, past the super mercado, past several lovely Inns, past fields of horses looking at palm trees, past chickens crossing the road (why?), past La Iguana Verde with its homemade bread, past Samara Pacific School, .... past everything...except Froggies Video store, and there was Pablito's Bar! There was an excited crowd of soccer fans in the front room as Costa Rica was playing Uraguay in the Gold Cup. Pablito's has two rooms. One up front with the TV and a back room that is totally open at the back with a slanted corriegated tin roof,  a concrete floor, dogs running in and out, an old bedstead in one corner, and silverware wrapped in plastic. We were totally into it! Great atmosphere! Character! We ordered our beers and each got a "Bocca" which is the Olla de Carne. Olla (pronounced here Oja) de Carne (pronounced "meat") is like mom's beef stew it turns out. Although we both have bad memories of trying to eat our mother's beef stew, we both agreed it was actually quite tasty!  The homemade salsa (whole chunks of pepper inferno), we were told by the locals, nearly takes their heads off. Since all I have to do is glance at any hot sauce and I sweat, but not wanting to appear wimpy, I just put a 1/2 a pinky-fingernail size piece of pepper at the very edge of my dish and told the rest of my food to avoid any contact. It seeped. I sweated. Not a new experience here. Sweating is a 24 hour/day experience ... which, oddly enough, I happen to like. The table of tourists next to us ordered Chardonnay (which made me wonder if I was having one of those meaningless and just WEIRD dreams that I have sometimes when I eat too much at night). Did I hear Chardonnay?...