Rambutan

This place is full of foods that I’ve never in my life seen or heard of. Going to market is a great cultural experience. I have enjoyed several new foods since arriving in PNG. Today I tried something called Rambutan. This is possibly the most bizarre fruit I have ever seen or tasted! I thought passion fruit was interesting, this definitely tops that! It is a small oval shaped fruit (smaller than a kiwi, but bigger than a grape) the skin bright red and has what looks like thick black hairs coming out of it. (Sounds appetizing I know!) To eat it, you cut open the skin (thankfully you don’t eat the skin) and inside is what looks like a white eyeball. It’s roughly the texture of a firm grape. You eat the flesh (the white eyeball part) and the spit out the seed that’s in the middle. I’m sure after this description most of you are thinking, why would you even want to eat that? Honestly, I don’t know what inspired me. I was prepared to spit it out and never try one again, but I was quite pleasantly surprised! It was pretty tasty. I fact I think I’ll go pop open another!