Geofruitography lessons

As we were leaving Jakarta airport terminal, I had a déjà vu from Istanbul… Not sure what specifically brought it up, but I had that feeling many times later during the trip.

Five drivers were trying to lure us into their cabs before we spotted our designated chauffer. When we were already next to the car, a guy on the sidewalk grabbed our bags and started loading them into the trunk, and a second later was all over us, blocking car doors and screaming that we must tip him.

As we got to the hotel, the service staff were running around smiling, taking care of the luggage, getting us seated comfortably, bringing us tea, as the reception was checking us in. We chatted a bit, then agreed to meet in a bit for a drink and went off to unpack. An hour later, I was telling my colleague:
     “Until this evening, I thought that’s what presidential suites looked like. Is your bathroom also the size of a football field or did they mess up with room types on my booking?”
     “Had you not stayed at an Asian hotel before? That’s standard”, said he, unimpressed.

I had spent the whole time running around the suite snapping away, trying to get some of that “dropped jaw” effect reflected in the lens of my camera. No, it didn’t work. I need a wider angle lens! And quite a bit more skill and practice, but that’s minute, right?

The bathroom was larger than my living room, and the bedroom was the size of my whole apartment. I was greeted by truffles and tropical fruit.



The ensemble contained at least four fruit I had not tried before. One morning we asked our local colleagues what they were, describing each fruit in detail. This proved a funny and fairly long charades game, but it helped us figure out that what we ate were passion fruit, snake fruit, mangosteen and longan. The last two are so exotic, that Microsoft spell-check refuses to recognize them.


Below sample fruit shots are courtesy of... the Internet, sorry.

Passion fruit. Slightly smaller than a pear, with hard and smooth skin that feels like plastic to the touch and, if knocked on, leaves an impression of the hollow inside. Underneath the "plastic", there's fairly thick and light inedible sponge-like layer which holds the precious seeds covered in juicy and very tasty pulp.

Mangosteen. Much like the passion fruit, it is very hard on the outside and has a thick sponge-like shell. The edible part inside is soft greyish-white, reminiscent of garlic cloves in shape. It is often sold after it's flower-like top dries off and takes on the dark color of the outer shell, so the whole fruit looks like a grenade. When you see it the first time, it is hard to imagine it to be edible, let alone that it contains such a pleasantly sweet and delicate heart.

 Snake fruit. Yet another fruit that reminds of garlic cloves. They are also pretty hard and crunchy, just like real garlic, except these are sweet and not smelly. There are always three cloves, with a black seed inside each. The shell looks like snake skin, is extremely thin, but hard; it peels off like shell off  a hard boiled egg.










Longan. These are the size of large grapes, but with a hard shell (I broke my nails on them!). The inside contains a large seed, but the pulp texture is very similar to grapes or lychee, or the earlier advertized rambutan.