In my
last post, I talked a lot about fruit.
In particular, I mentioned revisiting my opinion of passion fruit. True to my word, we let our last passion
fruit ripen another five days before cutting into it and trying the gooey
center again. My revised opinion: no
change. Actually, the fruit may have
become more bitter with time! I’ve been
told eating the passion fruit with sugar and mixed up in a drink is far better
than trying it raw. Since that was our
last fruit, though, I’m probably not going to be in any big hurry to try it
again.
On
Sunday we took our usual stroll to our favorite fruit stand. There we were pleasantly surprised to find
two of our favorite types of mangoes! One
is the larger, plumper type, with small pits and soft flesh that is almost
completely free of the bothersome fibers in most mangoes. The fruit vendor referred to them as “rich
people mangoes.” The other type I’d only
had once before when they were sold on campus last term. They are very large—almost unidentifiable as
a mango—and elongated, like an eggplant.
They have very thin, long pits and the flesh is almost buttery soft and
bursting with flavor. A single one of
these mangoes makes for a meal! After
doing a little snooping, I believe the “rich people mangoes” are manila mangoes
and the eggplant variety is a Madame Francis mango. (Of course that’s subject to change if and
when I learn better.)
I’m so
happy we discovered this fruit stand last term.
The guy who works on Sundays has to be one of the nicest Grenadians we’ve
met. He takes pride in what he sells and
encourages you to choose your own product, so you get the best pick (or at
least what you judge to be best). He’s
careful when bagging it and will ask you to carry softer produce (like bananas)
separately, so that they don’t get squished on your way home. He will go into great detail when explaining
how to prepare certain foods or how to detect when something is ripe enough to
eat. Last week I bought a breadfruit and
he cut it and seeded it for me. After
explaining how to keep the breadfruit and prepare it for cooking, he asked if I
wanted him to peel it for me. When we
left, he gave us a free waternut (immature coconut) to drink. Last Sunday, he asked us to pay less than the
total due, then gave us two free oranges and two free golden apples. I’m starting to think he appreciates our
business!
Speaking
of fruit, we got our hands on some ginormous starfruit! I know we had these treats last term also,
but they were one-third the size of these!
Now on
to creepier and crawlier topics…
On
Friday, Ivan and I joined a group of friends to celebrate a birthday. There were about a dozen of us who met at
Umbrellas, a restaurant on the shores of the Grand Anse beach, where we barely
caught the remnants of the sunset before ordering our dinners and enjoying some
drinks during happy hour. After dinner,
we made our way up north, toward St. George, stopping at one of Grenada’s forts
where we settled in at the “fort bar” for an evening of drinking, Taboo and
unofficial tours of the fort’s crumbling remains.
 |
| The birthday girl |
The mood
was dark as we skulked around the collapsing walls. Almost thirty years ago, during Operation Urgent Fury, when the U.S. invaded Grenada, a bomb meant for another fort had
been unintentionally dropped on this now-decimated tourist stop, with the
unlikely victims being patients of the then-insane asylum. To add a little chill to an already bloody
story, we were shown the crosshatched etchings in the walls of the cells, deep
and shadowy in the unsteady beams of our flashlights—scratches from the
patients of the asylum, as hauntingly permanent as the concrete walls
themselves.
As if we
weren’t already crawling with goosebumps, our next stop left us practically
screaming for mercy! Our party split,
one half scooting to our bar room to leave the other half ducking through
craggy tunnels in search of the frighteningly enormous spiders that frequented
such places. And, oh, we found
them! A rocky pit in the wall of the
tunnel housed two mammoth insects that I can only describe as horrifying. As large as the breadth of my outstretched
hand, plated with dull grey armor, climbing on thick slow legs, they were the
very representation of revulsion. Their
front legs (pedipalps) were folded in half and tipped with pincers, poised to
snatch at the unsuspecting. Their
abdomens looked like a series of interlocking plates, like a rattlesnake’s
rattle or the underside of a cockroach.
In
keeping with my curious nature, I researched the heinous creature and
discovered that it is a Tailless Whip Scorpion.
Although in the arachnid class, the tailless whip scorpion is neither
spider, nor scorpion (which explained the lack of webbing in their little
cave). They are not poisonous or really
harmful at all, despite their rather off-putting appearance. With a disturbing presence like that, it’s
not hard to believe that everyone in
that tunnel knew these nasty bugs made an unforgettable debut on the reality
show, Fear Factor. (In the clip, the
insects are mistakenly introduced as African Cave-Dwelling Spiders—also known
as Whip Scorpions. A little research
shows that they are, in fact, Tailless Whip Scorpions.) This was also the insect of choice to portray
the tortured spider in the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. So apparently the media agree that these
things leave a lasting impression.
As a
side note, many of you may remember Ivan’s little avocado project last
term. Alas, the avocado tree didn’t
quite survive the summer months.
However, Ivan took one of the genip seeds from last week and popped it
in a pot of dirt. Voila! We’ve got a sprout!
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