Peru sure does have very strange food here!  Yesterday, one of my Spanish teachers was teaching us Spanish words for fruits and vegetables.  Not only we were given a list of typical fruits and vegetables such as oranges, onions, and blueberries, but also strange and unheard of names such as chirimoya and granadilla.  Apparently, they were fruits and vegetables made specially in Peru.

The teacher gave us a homework which was to go the big market in Cusco and buy a fruit or a vegetable for the class to taste.  I was assigned to get a pepper.  Of course, I was thinking of the pepper that we, the Americans, eat.  So, I went to the market today thinking that I should find the BRIGHT RED piece of food.  Well, apparently, there are two very different kind of peppers – pimento and pimeno, and I didn’t realize it until I came to class today as the teacher said that I brought the wrong type of pepper.  UGH!  Oh well.  I lived and learned.  I will go back to the market one day and find the pimeno as I’m curious to see what it looks like.

Other students did actually buy fruits with VERY strange names and tasted them:

Tuna (No, it’s not that fish.  It’s just a fruit that happened to be named tuna.)

Lucuma

Granadilla

Chirimoya

Unfortunately, I had traveler’s sickness the other day from probably water or something that I ate – who knows.  Apparently, I was told by the Spanish school on the first day I arrived in Cusco that, in spite of precautions, more than half of the tourists still get traveler’s sickness from water or food.  Unfortunately, I ended up in the traveler’s sickness club.  Not to worry, it was nowhere near as bad as the food poisoning that I had when I was in New Zealand last December.  I just took Cipro, an antibiotic, relaxed, and recovered within a few hours.  However, I was reluctant to eat fruits that were just brought from the market and were not yet washed.