Adventures in Tropical Fruit 3

Remember how your mom always told you it's what's on the inside that counts? She's right. This wrinkly brown thing that looks remarkably like excrement:

is a passionfruit! You in fact chose the wrinkliest ones (they're at the right ripeness stage). This fruit, the fodder of dreams of tropical islands and the associated cocktails, is clearly never pictured from the outside in people's heads. But the taste does not disappoint--cut it in half and you immediately get a whiff of the tropics, and as you eat the crunchy seeds (we're talking corn kernel crunchy) and pulp with a spoon, you close your eyes and enjoy. Wouldn't want to catch a glimpse of the outside while you're eating... Delicious! My favorite so far.

Update: Adventures in Tropical Fruit 4: Yeah, I got more passionfruit :)

A balanced dessert

Balanced meals have lots of colors, yes? Am I doing it right?

Guava jam, lychee honey, and Nutella. Ignore my last question--I know I'm doing it right!

Adventures in Tropical Fruit

There is so much fruit here I don't recognize. Seriously, Google image "fruits réunion". What even is most of that stuff? I'm trying to figure it out. Whenever I go to the market (has to be the Saturday one, the grocery store has nothing interesting) I buy something I don't recognize and ask what it is and how to eat it. The first time I did it, I got a bag of goyaviers, which were at perfect harvest timing:

They look like baby pomegranates! Cute. According to the guy I bought them from, you peel them and eat the mushy inside. They're good--tart, but nice. Tons of seeds, which I didn't know to eat at first, but turns out you do eat them, which makes the fruit much more worth the effort. I recommend them if you get the chance. I do not however, know what they might be called in English. Nothing gives me a translation other than guava, which isn't right--goyavier seems to be Réunion-specific. Just eat the small red fruit in May, ok? So that's one thing to do with them. Another, according to the lady who walked up while the seller was explaining this to me, is to chop them in half and throw them in a bottle of rum for three months. I liked that idea too, so I now have my own rum arrangé brewing! I'll let you know how it is in a couple months. I just made this this morning (yes, this morning, no I don't know why) and it's already bright red... Scary or future delicious? TBD. So that was Adventures in Tropical Fruit 1. A smashing success.

Adventure 2 is an actual guava. A white one, which I was unfamiliar with.

It looks like a pear and smells heavenly (yes, it smells so good it warranted that cheesy an adjective). The guy who owns my apartment here has a disgustingly smelly old dog that the apartment usually smells like, but not while my guavas were in the kitchen! That powerful. You know how strong dog smell is. Anyway. I haven't ever had guava in another format than juice, so I don't know if the white ones are like the pink/red ones.  The texture is pear-like, but those seeds will break your teeth! I was really not impressed with the taste. It was like a bland pear, which isn't a fruit I love even when they're good.  So I wasn't going to get those again for eating anyway. Maybe for the smell.

BUT, since Saturday I have developed a truly fabulous bright red itchy lumpy swollen rash all over my neck and around my eyes. I am a sight to behold... The doctors (benefit of working in a hospital, instant access to many) said it's an allergic reaction, likely to food but maybe sugar cane flower, which has started blooming. The only new food I've had is the guava... My itchy cranky ass is therefore calling Adventures in Tropical Fruit 2 a bust. Guava is evil.

UPDATE: According to the doctor I saw today (again, benefit of a hospital) the allergic reaction is due to something I put on my skin, not food. So guava may not, in fact, be evil. But the white one still wasn't very good. So there.  (I'm still itchy and swollen and cranky, an you tell?)

Just some apples

I went to the market for apples. Only apples. I came home with this.

"This" contains no apples. It does, however, contain what will soon be the first installment of "let's figure out this tropical fruit I don't recognize!"

An odd side effect of being highly mobile...

I got an email address at work today (yeah, I've been here thee weeks, there were vacations, it's France). I'll probably only ever get a handful of emails there, and when I leave in three months, it will expire and be closed. No big deal. But it did make me think about how many email addresses I've had in my life. I came up with 14! Many of them, like my newest one, were for short stints (a master's at a different university almost each semester results in several, for example), but the trusty Yahoo has been with me since middle school. And I am currently checking five of them. Ridiculous!

A Perfect Weekend

This island has turned me into a morning person in three weeks flat. The sun sets reasonably early here--especially now, around 6pm, since it's 'winter'--but it rises early in the morning (around the other 6), so people here have adjusted and tend to get a very early start. For example, this went by my window at 8:30 this morning:

"This" was a parade led by a trumpet and drums.  Good thing I was already up! I suddenly can't even imagine being asleep at 8:30. Who am I and what have I done with myself??

Saturday morning I was up particularly early for a sightseeing adventure via one of the "long distance" buses. I took it from my town, on the southwest coast, around the southern part of the island across the expansive lava flows dating from various time periods and in different stages of returning to vegetation, which was very cool. The 2007 lava flow is still smoking in some places! On the other side of the lava, I stopped in a little town famous for its church that was not destroyed, but encircled, by lava in 1977. A miracle of course! From that tiny town there is a trail that leads along the coast through an unbelievable forest to a beach with waterfalls coming out of the cliffs beside it. The hike was honestly amazing. I still have trouble believing I'm here, seeing and doing all this amazing stuff, and it occasionally really hits me how cool this is. While hiking the trail, with the full force of the Indian Ocean at my back (I was on the east coast, so it was a "next stop Australia" feeling) and a verdant forest almost entirely full of plants I had never seen in front of me, I had a moment of absolute pure happiness, complete with a laughing fit! All alone in the forest. It was great. The whole day was awesome. Even the buses worked out, which seems to be a relatively rare event from what I've heard!

A flow from 1977

Part of my jungle hike

Ocean view from the jungle hike

The beach with waterfalls--they come out of the mountain you see in this picture.

This morning I enjoyed a lovely working breakfast on the balcony with some loquat (one of those many fruits you and I have never heard of) jam and a fresh local banana, which someone brought to work because the tree at her house was just too overloaded and they couldn't handle them all. So sad, but I helped her out by taking a delicious bunch home. They are short and fat and kinda orange on the inside and DELICIOUS.

This afternoon it was off to the lagoon for some snorkeling in the amazing aquarium that's attached to my beach. I saw a sea slug on the move today and wonder if that was the inspiration for the classically horrible series of Tremors movies... Then I headed home to get ready for a concert I went to with a coworker on the beach in a nearby town. It was awesome of course! We arrived just a bit after sunset and set up our picnic on the grass just beside the beach and talked and drank wine and ate amazing baked goods (one of the friends' friends is a baker in the process of opening his own bakery! Talk about a friend I need...) for hours. Seriously, it's been an amazing weekend. And tomorrow's a holiday!

I'm on Reunion Island!!

In light of all the administrative fumbling that led up to my arrival here, I was thinking of bringing back the WTF series. "Welcome to France," remember? But everyone knows that story (if not the details, how it usually goes at least). In short, the reputation of French bureaucracy is well deserved. Don't go down the rabbit-hole if you can avoid the allure of this strange lovely disaster of a country. I can't. It keeps pulling me back. But I made it through the admin, and here I am once again!

I'm not in what most people think of as France. My temporary new home is Reunion Island (La Réunion), a French overseas region located 430 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. No, I'm not studying lemurs. I work on a database of birth defects at the University Hospital in Saint Pierre where I am...not sure exactly what my job is. I thought I was doing research with a tiny bit of teaching. Then it seemed to be mostly teaching (a program I've never used, in French). But now I think I may be a biostatistician. It's all a bit unclear. But hey, I was never coming here for the work!

What I was coming for, I have found :) I live in an apartment two minutes from the beach. The beaches here are awesome. The ones where you swim are the ones with coral rings around them (to keep out the hungry angry sharks). The coral fringes turn the beaches into calm lagoons full of coral and tropical fish. There is AMAZING snorkeling 2 minutes from my front door! As someone who almost went down the marine biologist track, I'm rather over the moon. So many good memories of other tropical snorkeling adventures, and I can still ID a lot of the fish! And as nice as the beach here is, I hear tales of much better options scattered along the coast, so I'll have to explore those! I already checked out a black sand beach near here (Etang Salé) over the weekend, and it was awesome as expected. I started at one end of the beach, in town, and wandered way over to the wild outer edge of the area, where there was no coral and there were big tube waves (the kind you see in surfing pictures, probably 8 feet tall) and an agave-filled forest behind the beach.

But as amazing as the beaches are, everyone here will tell you that you don't come to Reunion for them. You come for the interior. The island is volcanic, so it has lots of topography. The highest point in the Indian Ocean is on Reunion (the Piton des Nieges at 10,069 feet--I'll see if I can get myself into suitable hiking shape to scale it...). The interior is made up of three old collapsed volcanoes called cirques (they're vaguely circular), which are sufficiently awesome to have earned the interior the designation of a World Heritage site. I already went to Cilaos, the closest cirque, and I get the attraction. I would have been totally happy with just the drive into the cirque from the coast! The road was long and wound along the incredibly steep edges of a ravine. Once in the cirques, you find villages scattered in unbelievable places. There's one cirque that even now has no roads--if you want to see it, you park at the edge and hike in. And yet that cirque has several villages in it! From another time... The cirques are most known for the hikes though. I was only briefly in Cilaos, but we hiked down a ravine and across a river, coming up the other side, then went back around via the road that ran through an interesting high-altitude cool forest. And there were so many other trails we didn't have time for! I'll absolutely be going back. Plus I bought my travel guide for the island, so I'm plotting other adventures now!

View of the town of Cilaos from across a ravine

Cute beach trees in St. Pierre

Look at that water!

My black sand beach with wave show