Irregular Webcomic! #3597

This strip is, believe it or not, based on a true story.

I was on a holiday in Peru, and my tour group stopped at a chicha bar near Ollantaytambo, to try some of the chicha, the local corn beer. In the area around Cusco, it comes in natural and strawberry flavoured varieties, and has an alcohol content similar to beer. It's served in huge glasses - the size is not clear in the photo below because there's nothing to give them scale, but they hold about a pint each.

While relaxing and enjoying some chicha, we played games of sapo, which is essentially the same as the British pub game known as toad in the hole. You throw brass discs at a board with holes in it, aiming to get the discs through the holes to score points. In the middle of the board is a brass frog with a tempting open mouth, which provides the maximum score if you succeed in the very difficult task of tossing a disc into it.

While we were playing, and doing rather badly, a local family came into the bar, a father, mother, and a girl about ten years old. They bought three glasses of chicha, one for the man, one for the woman, and one for the girl. The girl got a regular pint-sized glass, not a small one, I should point out. After a while of drinking and watching us with amusement as we struggled with the sapo board, the girl came over to challenge us to a game.

Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the girl (that's my wife throwing), but that's her father standing in the back left corner with his half-drunk strawberry chicha. Anyway, you can probably guess the punchline of the story. Fortunately we weren't actually placing any money on the outcome, but the ten-year-old girl, after downing a giant glass of corn beer, managed to beat everyone in our tour group.