Firstly, the blog is coming up in Thai, not English, so if things are in the wrong place or seem weird, we'll have to fix it when we land in the Queen's home country.
Meanwhile, we are finding the Thai people to be extraordinarily friendly. They are very encouraging when it comes to learning their language. Despite our pathetic attempts to remember simple niceties like "thankyou", (kop koon kah if you're a girl), they persevere with us, always smiling, always friendly.
At breakfast this morning we were served by Ting, who brought us our room service lunch yesterday, shortly before we passed out. Today he came straight up to our table with what looked like two figs in his hand. "It's a fig!" I said and he said yes. Did we want to try? I don't like fresh figs but I said "Sure". So he took the fruit knife from Mark's setting and deftly cut the 'fig' around the girth. He twisted it, pulled the top half away, and revealed a nest of white, fleshy segments!
"Wow!", I said, surprised that it wasn't a fig. "I'll try that!". I plucked a single segment out with my fork and put it in my mouth - it was juicey, sweet and tangey, all at the same time. "What's the name of this?" I asked Ting. He said the name, knew we didn't get it, so went over to the buffet where there were dozens of the fruit sitting in a bowl, and brought the little sign with the name on it back to our table.
MANGOSTEENS. That's what they are. DELICIOUS!!! That's how they taste. Ting said there's a huge tree full of them growing just outside his family's farm. He said they only fruit for two months of the year - June and July. He said by next month, the tree will be "fat" with fruit, it's branches drooping with their weight.
Those little white segments nestled inside pink flesh. Yet the outside of the fruit is so deceptively like a fig. I guess God ran short of designs on the day he made figs and mangosteens. Maybe he thought the fig lovers of the world would never make it to Thailand in order to get confused...
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