Monthly Archive for January, 2007

And what, pray, is a wampee? First off, let me ask you: did you grow up in North America? Then you’ve probably never eaten one; in fact, you’ve probably never seen one. There’s a slim chance you passed by some in a Chinatown or West Indian fruit market and ignored them because they’re not flashy like dragonfruit or famous like passionfruit. But you were missing out!

My parents struggled home on Saturday with two huge bags of this incredibly rare and delicious little fruit (which we know as ‘guinip’ in the Caribbean), and we scarfed down the entire thing in one day. Al and I haven’t seen them in – oh, I’d say about six years. They’re about as big as a cherry tomato, and the skin is thin and pliant. I can’t think of any analogues to western fruits, unless there’s one out there where you bite into the skin only until it cracks under its own tension and reveals the goods.

This is what it looks like before you bite into it:

And this is what it looks like after you get it open:

The flesh inside tastes like a cross between a Strawberry-Kiwi Starburst and a Sour Cherry Blaster, but there’s only a thin layer of it around a huge seed. Result: you can eat about 150 guinip before you feel even slightly full.

Well, that’s today’s tropical fruit lesson – and also a nifty experiment to see how well my camera’s macro setting works.  Uh, but  for more wampee information, you can go to this Purdue University site.

While cleaning out my hard drive this weekend I found a picture taken while my consulting team was on a soils training trip – actually, on a detour we took to have a picnic at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park. Very neat place, loads of hoodoos.  So many memories…

Because to everyone’s amusement, I fell off a hoodoo while taking a photograph. (Seriously: I was walking backwards going “Ooh, I think I can fit everything!” and then I just stepped off the back of the hoodoo with a “WAAUUGHHH!” that echoed across the park. And very, very luckily I landed in a clump of bushes rather than on the nearby pointy rocks, which allowed me to make the long ride back to Calgary in the minivan rather than a hearse. Gigantic bruises, though. My camera, annoyingly, escaped without a scratch.)

Anyway, while looking for something unrelated a while ago, I discovered that Arnold Schwarzenegger did the exact same thing while filming ‘Conan the Barbarian’ in 1982. I guess he was on top of the rocks in that wolf scene – you know, right after he gets set free from being a slave gladiator? – and totally just fell off the back of the rocks. To my mind, this makes us almost cousins – practically blood brothers. I’m all, “I feel your pain, Arno.” I hear Stephen Harper invited him to come visit and talk about alternative energy later this winter. Maybe I should show up and introduce myself, and ask if he’s got any Conan souvenirs I could have, like maybe his fur boots.