Coconut Verde

When your Friday night has ground to a bit of a halt, what more a restorative thing can you do than to hack open a green coconut and attempt to consume the fluids it contains? Mine was from Costa Rica.

Yes, well, I'm told it makes a popular drink in coconut-rich regions, and I am always eager to experience new things. So, after about ten minutes of huffing and puffing and molestation with a bread knife, I was granted access to the centre of coconut water and sipped at it delicately. Imagine if feta cheese was actually some kind of nougat, but not so sweet and without the pink bits, and then you drank the watery bit it came in... that's what it tasted like. Or, more literally, like one part coconut milk to two parts water. Yes. It was educational for the fingers and brain too, enabling me to guess well at how coconuts grow inside their pods.

Two thirds of the length of the coconut drained, and I started to encounter a texture in the drink more akin to mucus, and decided my education would be more suited to understanding how the nut (which is not a nut) responded to impacts, and with that, dropped it from the second floor window* onto the concrete step in the garden below. When I approached it I found not so much as a single honourary dent in its stubborn hide. I hurled it with all my might at the steps, whereupon it ran, with all the indignant fervour it could manage, to the opposite side of the garden. Concealed by darkness and shrubbery, I cannot help but think it would be licking its wounds right now, had it a tongue. And so, I believe it has earned a place in the garden. I shall call it... Estonia.

In other news, I have long thought my geography of countries fairly comprehensive until today I sought to test myself with this internet quiz. While I am still a long way more enlightened than the sort who think of Africa as a country, it is quite sobering to be unable to locate dozens of proud nations, many with land mass enough to easily eclipse that of my own.

I remain rather proud, however, of my ability to name some more obscure countries (not wanting to insult my non-existent international audience, I just mean, let's say, those out of the public eye) such as:
East Timor (because part of Splinter Cell:Pandora Tomorrow takes place there)
Bolivia (because it's where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid go)
Swaziland (because I simply have no excuse not to know where it is)
Chad (because megalomania and a lack of good international policy led me to decide to bomb there when I was about six)

* - In this respect I agree utterly with Americans. To enter a house at ground level means you have just entered the first floor. How could the floor above that be the first when if you go to it, it is actually the second level you have come across?