Fruits

The other day I bought mangos, an avocado (but too watery), an orange and an apple. I also bought a small bunch of little bananas, but it didn’t take long for the ants to smell them and form a bustling highway. Aside from Cebu having the best mangos in the world that I get to eat every day (“the best” means sweet; small seed, therefore more flesh; and rarely any teeth-catching fibres), my favourite fruit here is called mangosteen. The only thing it has in common with mango is its delightfulness. On the outside it looks like a smooth purple passion fruit, but the inside is more like lanzone (another fruit I only discovered since coming here that looks a little like a baby potato on the outside). Gosh, this is difficult to describe… You break the tough, purple skin to find the sweetest citrus-shaped pieces of pale, white flesh inside. Inside some of the pieces are seeds, but often many of the pieces are seed-free and you can just squish the whole, sweet thing in your mouth without having to eat around anything. Really, I’m not doing the mangosteen any justice here.

There’s also a fruit called rambutan, red furry things that also taste very sweet, although the white flesh inside is difficult to get off the seed. As with mangosteen and lanzone you break the skin open, but inside rambutan you find what looks like a single, translucent tapioca pearl inside. It’s sweeter than a lychee but that’s the only other fruit I can think of to compare it to. I think it’s a very pretty fruit.

Next time you’re in a Chinatown somewhere and see some strange-looking fruits, just ask for mangosteen, rambutan and lanzone (pronounced lan-zone-eh, but the “eh” is pronounced like the spanish/italian “e” vowel and not like the Canadian “eh” we’re so famous for). Try them all. They’re very lami (delicious in Cebuano).