Colombia Has Fruit I Had Never Seen Before

Beginner (A2) · Food & Drinks · 13 min · Premium

I went to a food market in Bogota and I was not ready for it.

Four pineapples sitting in a row. Bananas everywhere, yellow and green. Apples, red and green. Mangoes in piles. Broccoli, cauliflower, onions, cucumbers, kiwi, mandarins. And then a fruit I had genuinely never eaten in my life: فاكهة التنين, dragon fruit. Colombia was the first place I ever tried it, and it was lovely.

While I was standing there I worked out why the market looks like that. Colombia sits on the equator, so the climate is tropical, so the fruit is tropical: mango, pineapple, dragon fruit, banana. Mandarins and oranges and pomegranates are not tropical at all. Those come from around the Mediterranean: Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt.

And in Canada, where I live now, there is no pomegranate and no mango. Not much fruit at all, honestly.

Along the way you get the words for all of it, and the difference between فواكه and خضروات, which is one of those distinctions you only really learn by having somebody point at things.

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