Fruit season

With the rainy season (although it hasn't been raining much) or the austral summer, we have been eating a lot of tropical fruits. In addition to the papayas (papayes), pineapples (ananas, or painapo in Tahitian), bananas (bananes), pamplemousses (Southeast Asian pomelos), and limes (citrons) that grow year round here, supermarkets are now filled with mangoes (mangues) and avocados (avocats, which also means "lawyer"). The latter are not the creamy Haas avocados from California, but enormous, green-skinned fruit that are much blander in taste.

We also have soursops (corrosol in French, guanábana in Latin America), these strange, misshapen green fruit covered in little (blunt) spines, like some kind of fruit Godzilla. The inside is super-sweet white flesh, slightly stringy and very wet, with lozenge-like black seeds throughout. I picked a nearly ripe soursop from a tree by the lab two days ago and gave it to a student, who put it in the dirt lab--but soursops ripen much faster than I realized, and the next day it was sitting on the cement outside the lab, turning blackish and oozing juice from the bottom half. I went to take a shower, and came back, and somebody's kids had found it and thrown it on the ground to make it explode! Little drops of white soursop flesh, each bearing a smooth black seed, were everywhere. I was angry.

We have an ever-changing assortment of ripening fruit on top of our microwave. I got a star fruit (carambole) from a friend on Saturday, and this weekend I got to try two tropical fruits that were new to me: rambutan (ramboutan) and sweet-apple (pomme-cannette; also called sweetsop or custard apple). Rambutan are the length of your thumb, are red, and look like they have lots of short hairs (rambut is Indonesian for hair). On the inside they are like lychees, with rubbery white flesh and a single pit. Sweet-apples are related to soursop, and are similar on the inside, although not as overwhelmingly sweet. On the outside they are covered in lots of fingernail-sized bumps, which are removed before the flesh inside can be eaten. It probably wins as the weirdest fruit I have ever eaten. In a sign of my biology geekiness, it also wins as the first fruit I've ever eaten that I knew by its scientific name first (Annona squamosa, in the Flore de la Polynésie française).

None of these plants, it is worth noting, are native to French Polynesia.