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Healthy Island Living: The best things in life are free and require a little bit of exercise.
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You can buy your girl cake, you can buy your girl wine, but this girl only falls for fruit. Although I have not yet elaborated on all the fruit I am discovering, today I will tell you about one I discovered within the first few weeks of my arrival. Today's fruit is guinep (or skinnip).
Because I run on a constant fuel of fruit, Mr. B bought me a few branches of guinep from town the other day. They were maybe a couple days too old by the time I finished them, but very nice and sweet. Only 3 dollars for the bunch.
But the thing is--fruit does grow on trees. Basically, fruit is 'free'/'up for grabs' for whoever has a tree, or whoever can find a wild tree. And I know where a grove of guinep grows. Today I took Ty, Mr. B's puppy for a bush walk down to this grove. With a little bit of my monkey skills, I was able to wrangle a grocery bag full of these silly little snacks!
What exactly are they? Well, here's a pic -->
(the ones up front have been opened and eaten = shells and seeds)
They are a quail egg (or extra-large grape)-sized fruit. The fruit comes in a green shell/peel. The skin will pop off pretty easily. Inside is a mooshy (snot-textured) pink flesh of fruit that is tightly adhered to a large oval seed. Truth be told, there is not much flesh, and it takes a whole lot of sucking and gnawing to get a tiny bit of fruit off the large pit. Haha. But if you're sitting there working at it for 20min (or an hour :l ) then you feel like a monkey again, foraging for your food.
yum*yum*yum*
When I first came here, I wondered whether guinep could be the root of the slow pace on the island. They take so much time to eat, and they are addicting distractors from your work. Okay, that sounds like myth. ;)
If you want an extended description of the fruit, check out Wikipedia. And to see this and other fuits unique to the tropics, check out this Jamaican fruits webpage! <-- I have made it a goal to meet all of these fruits! . . . and eat them!!!! :D
