Watermelons

I’ve talked about some out there tropical fruit like durians and dragonfruit.  I’ve talked about some tropical fruit which isn’t as out there but is either scarce or expensive in most western countries, like mangoes are.  But I’ve never talked about a fruit that is considered normal in North America.  Nothing is as quintessential to a summer barbecue or picnic in North America as a big slice of watermelon.  What makes the watermelons in Burma feel so foreign, reminding you that you are, in fact, in a distant land, eating fruit grown in distant lands, is the sheer quantity of the fruit which the vendors have piled behind them.

Mango Season

Mango season in South Asia starts around May and lasts through until July or August.  You never really realise just how many mango trees there are in Yangon until the mangoes start dropping at your feet as you’re walking down the street.  That’s what happened just before I took this photo.  I was walking home from the supermarket and a mango dropped out of the sky just a few feet in front of me.  I was all, “It’s raining MANgoes!”  Bad puns aside, I couldn’t help taking a picture of the mango where it had dropped at my feet so I’d always remember the time I lived in the place where huge, fresh, ripe, juicy, delicious mangoes dropped from the sky at your feet, a seeming offering from the gods.  Now, I’m back to living in a place where I have to go to a supermarket and spend $10 if I want to enjoy a mango.  Ah, nostalgia.  Le sigh…

Dragonfruit… and ants!

The guy I was dating in Burma had heard that one of his favourite musicians would always start his day with fruit, so my boyfriend then started eating fruit for breakfast, so then I started always eating fruit for breakfast.

Pretty much the only fruit I would ever eat in Burma was dragonfruit.  It’s the fruit that is hot pink on the outside and looks kind of spiky, but is super easy to cut into.  On the inside, you find about a million tiny black seeds embedded into flesh that is either blood red or pure white, as in this picture.  On the particular day that I took this photo, I wasn’t hungry enough for a whole dragonfruit, so I ate only hlf.  Since I was in a rush, I forgot to put the other half of the fruit away, and when I came home from work later that day, I found my dragon fruit absolutely crawling with ants.  Yep, if you look carefully at this photo, all those little brown things are ants.  And, what’s more, it took a few tries before I got the picture I liked, and by the time I snapped this particular picture, a LOT of the ants had gotten spooked and gone away.