fruit

just had a kiwi (the fruit, not the person from new zealand!) and it was sour as hell. it's been sitting on my kitchen shelf for the past oh, let's see, 2 to 3 weeks and still, it hasn't turned ripe. maybe the acids will help burn off some of the fats in my stomach? i wish. but this is a fact: the fruit is known as the kiwifruit, but the americans call it a kiwi.

and another fact: the kiwifruit is native to the yangtze river valley (northern china) and zhejiang province (eastern china)! missionaries brought these first seeds to middle earth aka new zealand at the turn of the last century. amazing, eh? i used to know someone whose favourite fruit was the kiwifruit. she'd sometimes buy it from the fruit stall at the nearby kopitiam where we used to have lunch, if she even had lunch that day. and her usual lunch consisted unvaryingly of curry chicken rice. how well does kiwifruit go with curry chicken?? hmm.

my favourite fruit used to be the watermelon. i'd have an entire half of it for lunch after school, and not be able to eat anything else for the rest of the day. but there was a long period of time when i stopped eating it. these days, i still like watermelon, but dragonfruit will do too. and mandarin oranges. and strawberries. and bananas, sometimes. the long kind. not the tiny ones. and dark red cherries. and sometimes, creamy durians. and mangoes.

you get the idea.

i'd always found it funny that people from new zealand should be known as some kind of fruit, though. imagine if people started calling singaporeans aah... papayas, or mangosteen. or... i dunno. i was talking to a german friend the other day, and i realised how lucky we are in the tropics to get such a variety of fruits! up in stone-cold germany, they only get ther usual apples, pears, oranges! gosh! and freshly-squeezed juice is so expensive. but for people from such countries, it is difficult for them to grasp the idea of a $1.50 glass of sugar-cane juice with lemon. such simple pleasures.