Ah Weather, Oh Fruit

I love the rain in Bogota. I love to see it splashing in the courtyards more than anything, but I love to see it dripping from the plants and to hear it rattle on the skylight.

I also love the afternoon sun. We were home early, having finished with the exam, and I sat in the cheerful sun reading Yeats slowly and having misgivings about living in a city—Yeats will do that to you.

The sun here is strong; you really have to put on sunscreen or you’ll burn. When you’re walking briskly in the cool of an overcast day and the sun breaks forth, you are quickly overwarm. The temperature fluctuates very little so they feel hot when it gets around and above 70, and they feel cold when its below 60. I suppose after a while we’ll get that way too. It is not as bad for us now as at first to walk in the sun—you learn to vary your pace.

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Nice to be in the tropics though. On one corner they have four different little vegetable stores. We went to a bigger one a little further away. It is probably as big as an Aldi only its all fruit and vegetables save for the meat counter in the back. The sheer abundance is just baffling: three kinds of tree tomato, green plantain and yellow, small and big papaya, oranges, onions, seven kinds of potato, yucca, huge squashes rolling on the floor, enormous and useless zuccini–we think, long onion (not entirely unlike green onion because they harvest it a lot later, or perhaps it really is a different thing), mangoes, Chilean peaches, kiwis, apples, and about seven kinds of fruit I do not recognize, beside passionfruit and lulo, lemons, small bananas and regular bananas, pineapples–which are wonderful cheap, all of it in great mounds and greens of every description, including fresh chamomile and peppermint.

I suppose they are greengrocers. It is not uncommon for the greengrocers to have a butcher’s counter in the back, if they can squeeze it in. And many times you can watch soccer while your wife picks through things, though at the one we attended they had lively music.

Katrina is experimenting with maracuya—passionfruit—which is used to make a sort of juice, like lemonade. I want to her to learn to handle the guanabana because there is no juice like the juice of the guanabana (guanabanas are large though, the size of a bloated football, more or less). We tried raw guavas and that kind of bombed; maybe we didn’t get good ones but as far as I can tell, the only thing they’re really good for is bocadillo—and that is enough for me.

She got some grapes a few days back and was surprised to find seeds in them. It was kind of startling to see her taken aback by the fact that a grape had seeds (they are kind of a pain to eat, and brought back memories of the bitter taste of an accidentally bitten grape seed). Now she’s trying some kind of really coconutty pound cake with her hot chocolate.

Saturday we’re going to the big bakery on the corner to have arepas and tamales. The arepas are supposed to be the best in the neighborhood. And they serve the coffee there in ceramic cups, rather than flimsy plastic ones. It should be a fine occasion.