Hairy Balls

The closer you get to the equator the more interesting and tasty the fruit gets! Fresh pineapple juice replaces my fresh lemonade habit and I get to eat some of the fruits my parents get excited about whenever we approach the earth's mid-line. The hotel gives us an assortment of fresh fruit in our rooms daily. We've been getting passion fruit, apples, green oranges, what my mom calls 'kolikuttu' bananas and something that looked suspiciously like durian, but turned out to be an Indonesian fruit called 'salak'. This morning, on our way out, my mom asked the front desk if they had rambutan. In 2003, when we went back to Sri Lanka for the first time in several years, the first fruit mission my parents went on was for rambutan. My dad gave our driver 10 rupees and told him to buy a bunch from a fruit stand on the road. The driver was embarrassed to tell him that it wasn't enough. In fact, it would have only bought one small fruit. My parents were shocked to find they cost 6 rupees each. Not sure why rambutan became so expensive in Sri Lanka, but they're giving it away here...

When we got back to our room in the afternoon we had a bowl of spiky, round, red fruit waiting for us. My mom was like a kid on Christmas morning opening those things. When she finally handed one over to my sister, almost under her breath she pointed out that "they look like hairy balls" in an attempt to dissuade her from eating it. That's my mom. They are pretty delicious, but I think the appeal for my mom has a lot to do with the memories of eating them as a kid in Sri Lanka.