After watching a man eagerly make his purchase, I assumed the fruit would
be good and bought a couple of guayabas (a type of guava that I wasn't familiar
with) from a street vendor. They weren't; they'd been picked a month
too early and never ripened. But the vendor's little boy made up
for it. He had drawn enormous Groucho Mark-style eyebrows on
his forehead with an indelible purple felt-tip marker and his mother and
I had a big laugh about that.
Above, pejibaye, the fruit of a kind of palm tree. It's like a
cross between butternut squash and sweet potato, and makes a wonderful
creamed soup.
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It's so humid in Costa Rica that salt clumps and won't come out of the
shaker, therefore it's not found on restaurant tables. You have to ask for
it. When it arrives they don't warn you that it's stored inside a
heatlamp oven and that the container they're handing you is startlingly hot.
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