Beware the Prickly Pear

I was recently browsing in the produce section of my local Meijer store, and after grabbing the usual grapes and oranges I had a quick peak at the "weird" stuff section. You know, the little area with the odd coconut, pomegranate, or starfruit; the stuff you may have heard of but still don't buy too often. Well they had something I'd never tried before: prickly pears!

I've never even seen these things sold anywhere, so I just jumped right in. Didn't know how they are eaten, or what a good one looks like, so I just started squeezing them and giving them a good looking over. They were 3 for $2, so I did a good amount of fruit moving around. I put the three winners in a provided plastic bag and that was that.

But, these little guys aren't called prickly pears because they used to be prickly. This diabolical plant has two types of spines. The big mean ones are removed by the pear technicians, but there are also very fine, transparent, hairlike spines to deal with. These detach and become embedded in the skin. So after touching countless of the little things, my hands were covered in little bits of pain. It was like having 15 or so splinters at the same time. I definitely looked like someone to avoid, walking around a supermarket, staring intently at my own contorted hands and mumbling painful expressions to myself. I got most of them out, but I'm typing this with a band-aid on one finger. Shouldn't those things have a warning label or something?

Well in case anyone would like to have a little taste test at home, if you avoid hurting yourself you've won most of the battle. Peeling and eating the fruit is pretty straightforward.


How to eat a prickly pear:

The culprit. Use a rag or gloves or something while cutting to avoid being poked a bunch by invisible pricklies.

First cut off either end of the fruit to get rid of the stem and other inedibles.


Then make a slight cut towards the center, and simply peel the rind off of the fruit with your hand. It separates easily.


Ta-Da!


The fruit is nice and juicy. There are seeds throughout but they are edible. It has a bit of a watermelon sort of taste.

Prickly pear fun fact: the eagle eating a snake on the flag of Mexico is perched on a prickly pear cactus. The legend is that the Aztecs built their capital city of Tenochtitlan at its location because they were told to look for the eagle by the god Huitzilopochtli(whose name is hereby declared unpronounceable). Tenochtitlan(present day Mexico City) literally means "the place of the cactus fruit" (source here).

Colombian Candy Bars

While I write a bit more on Colombia, I thought this was worth sharing by itself.

The name of this delicious Nestle treat is Beso de Negra, or "Black Kiss" according to Google Translate. The African American woman pictured blowing a kiss on the wrapper is a bit risque by American standards. I think it's a nice little illustration of how race is treated differently in other countries. The treat is like a chocolate covered marshmallow atop a cookie. The tagline is "delicious chocolate flavor... delicious cookie".


Here is a much more attractively named ripoff of Baby Ruth sold in Colombia: Baby Johnny's!

Rail Line to Machu Picchu Destroyed by Floods

There aren't a lot of pictures to show of my current adventures, which include job hunting and MBA night classes, but I've still got a few little things up my sleeve.

In the mean time, I've been following the dramatic events in Peru. Haiti is obviously where the world's attention is rightly focused at the moment, but many of the areas I visited just a few months ago have been destroyed by heaving rains and mudslides. The PeruRail line I traveled on from Cusco to Aguas Calientes was damaged to the point that the nearly 1,300 tourists that had come to see Machu Picchu needed to be airlifted out.

As the train is the only way for tourists to get to Machu Picchu aside from mountain hiking, the city of Aguas Calientes is being evacuated of its residents as well. With tourism at zero for the near future, there's no money coming in and no reason to stay.

BBC News reported that "some tourists had to rely on locals for food after cash machines dried up and prices for some goods soared."

An MSNBC blurb on the evacuations.