What the hell does "sin mondingo" mean anyway?

When I was a girl and would stay with my Grandparents in Miami over the summer it was a time in my life that I enjoyed more than just about anything else. I was a completely different person in Miami than I was back home in New Jersey... I mean COMPLETELY different, for a lot of reasons... a lot of really good reasons.

In NJ I was a good girl. I had a boyfriend or two in my young young life at that point, I had my close friends, I was a typical Jersey girl in a lot of ways I guess. I got mediocre grades, I was more interested in socializing and boys than I was in homework and school, I loved hanging out with my friends. It wasn't nearly a "perfect" home life but I managed. I had A LOT of responsibilities for a lot of different reasons and had to grow up fast, very very fast.

In Miami I was carefree... I had not a worry in the world... I had people that actually took care of ME for a change... I felt free and wild and happy... and it showed. I flirted with boys... I "kissed" around (because I was only a kid really!). I acted recklessly and with abandon. I did crazy KID things. I had pure, simple, joy filled FUN... sometimes at the risk of my own reputation but I never did anything "bad" really. I was more dangerous and crazy but it was all good and it gave me a much needed outlet from my much different and more responsible life back home. I swam in all my clothes. I rowed an inflatable boat in a pond that had alligators and swam in that same pond. I played pranks and climbed trees and went fishing (a lot) and played stickball and tennis and ate Cuban food to my hearts content and almost NEVER spoke English and best of all I played tackle football with the boys on the golf course every year when the rains came and flooded the course out so that the entire thing was covered in water up to my shins.... broke 3 toes on one foot doing that one year! LOL! It was all good... ALL the time.

So anyway, when I was a much younger girl than that my Grandparents loved to take me to this little Cuban cafe near where we lived. It was just a little hole in the wall place but they had good Cuban food, excellent "cafe Cubano" and everyone was Cuban and nobody spoke English. We used to go to this little place where I would undoubtedly order my own food with my little Americanized twist. They had this soup, this Cuban soup, and it was good but it had all this TONS of "gunk" in it that as a child of 9 or so I didn't like. I didn't want all the extra GUNK... I just wanted soup. So I would order my soup, in Spanish like a good little Cuban girl, and then I would say "sin mondingo." Which in reality was a word I had made up on my own. In Spanish "sin" means without and, well, "mondingo" was my little made up Spanish word for all that extra GUNK they put it in. This would undoubtedly cause a chuckle at the table as one of my Grandparents would then go on to explain what I meant. I wanted my soup SIN MONDIGO... understood?

So as time has passed and I became an adult I started to look at my life in Miami as my life "sin mondingo"... without all that extra baggage and GUNK that gums things up and makes things more difficult.

I'd like one life please... yes... and please make that "sin mondingo." Gracias.