Day 13 - The vegetable market in Cali

In Norway the stores sell one type of banana. It is the same type everywhere.

In Cali there are seven basic types of banana! Today we went to a big fruit and vegetable market and got an introduction to many fruits and vegetables that we had never even heard of. It makes one realize how poor the selection really is in the Norwegian stores, which is sad, because a lot of the things we tried here taste very delicious and can be used in so many ways!

One type of yellow banana, about three times the size of the ones we eat in Norway, is used only for making banana soup. We had that for lunch today; it was yummy! (Mostly because of the spices — the bananas themselves taste almost like potatoes.)


Another type of banana is completely black when you buy it. If you saw a banana like that at home, you'd throw it in the garbage for sure! That one is eaten grilled, and tastes really sweet. Then there are green bananas for eating raw, brown bananas that must be boiled in water, finger bananas, and a couple of kinds more.










And other types of fruits in all varieties: Passion fruit, zapote, many kinds of melons and watermelons, humongous pineapples, three different sorts of guayaba, and countless others. Colombians know fruit!

And vegetables as well! Today we had fried fish from the Rio Cauca for supper, and manioca (or yuca; they use both names here) was just perfect with that.

It is a dark brown root which is white as snow on the inside. They mash it and fry it so it tastes like French fries, only better.














Every day they serve us a new type of juice in the hotel restaurant, one more tasty than the other. Some of the best ones we had so far were lulo juice and guanábana (soursop) juice. You can see Enrique, the hotel owner, holding a guanábana fruit in one of the photos (and Ulf's hand holding a zapote in another).


(We are enjoying a couple of fresh pitaya fruits as we are typing this! Can you spot them in the photos? :-)

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Our son has started to speak Norwegian! He is like a tape recorder: anything we say (in any language) comes out again. We have started reading the picture books in Norwegian instead of Spanish, and he repeats every word instantly. Apart from his first words (motorsykkel and nese) he now knows and uses words like panne (he got another bump on his forehead today, when he ran straight into an iron doorframe because he turned around whilst running, to tell mami to hurry up), truse, mage, lepper, and én - to - tre!

This weekend we are expecting three new adoption families here at the hotel: One couple from France, one single adopting parent (also from France), and one family from Australia, who is not only bringing one of their own children for their stay in Cali, but adopting four children (four biological brothers and sisters)! We have already met the four children, and they seem very nice.