Thai Fruits

I mentioned the exotic fruits and yes, we've had some.

  • Mangosteen: it's purplish outisde and you can open it with your fingers. Inside it has white cloves that look like garlic, but there the resemblance ends. These cloves are sweet and delicious and deserve the name Queen of Fruits, as it is known here. It apparently also has great medicinal qualities and mangosteen juice is now an export product.
  • Pomello: it's like a giant grapefruit only much sweeter
  • small pineapples: they are the size of a large apple but look just like their bigger cousins. They peel and cut them in a spiral shape, leaving a bit of the top on so you can eat it like pineapple on a stick. Very sweet and juicy.
  • jujube: looks like a small green apple, the size of a plum, and it's crispy like an apple but less sweet. We tasted wine made from jujube and it tastes a bit like sherry.
  • dragon fruit: it comes with a pink or yellow rind, though I only had the pink kind. The flesh is white with black speckles, like it's been dusted with poppy seeds. We were supposed to taste wine made from dragon fruit also but it's very popular and they were sold out. The dragonfruit tree looks like a twistd version of an aloe vera plant perched on top of a 3 foot palm tre trunk.
  • rose apple. Looks like a shorter, narrower version of red delicious apple and not quite as red and also much less sweet.
  • finger banana. Truly, the size of your index finger. No longer and no thicker. They too taste just like their big brothers. Evidently they have 60 species of banana inThailand.

The mandarins are in season now and we have been getting a small fruit basket daily in our hotel in Chiangrai. The mandarins are so sweet and juicy we decided to go out to the road and pick up a few from a vendor selling from the bed of his pickup. He spoke zero English, but found a piece of paper on which he wrote 20. We took that to mean 20 baht per piece, about 70 cents. A little pricey. We wanted to buy 10 pieces and we said we'd pay 10 baht per piece, or 100 total and flashed him our money. He was very animated and as we put 5 pieces into one bag, he started filling more bags. We kept taking out the extra, wanting only 5 piece in each of two bags. Clearly we were miscommunicating. Eventually, he took my bag of 5 mandarins and put it on a scale which we hadn't noticed until now. It was 1 kilo, and that cost 20 baht.

Comments

Anonymous said…
yuppers...there's lots of fruits in thailand. if you want a little fun on your return try and take a durien on board the plane with you. hell, you could even try and get one into your hotel. trust me, the thai people really enjoy tricksters. for an added benefit, you might try some yourself.

charlie
5:11 PM
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