Van Boughner

I slept in a little this morning, and hung out in the room with
Phillip until breakfast. That was relaxing, we’re getting a lot of
sleep here, 9 or 10 hours every night so far.

Breakfast was lots of watermelon. I didn’t try to mix it with
cantaloupe today (and they didn’t serve cantaloupe anyway), so I felt a
lot better. That was, until I ate too much watermelon too fast. That
made me feel pretty overfull for about 15 minutes until the feeling
passed. It’s so simple to eat just watermelon for breakfast,
if you eat slow and enjoy the company of the people around you
(i.e. don’t eat it fast like I did.)

We walked up to the hot springs today. A beautiful, but steep walk.
We were ready for a break by the time we arrived, and getting in the
water felt great. There is no sulfur smell to the water here like
other hot springs I’ve seen. Two rustically finished off pools,
provided a couple temperatures to choose from. Time passed
surprisingly quickly. We got back a little late for lunch, and we
were hungry.

Lunch: banana smoothies, as well as solid bananas, and “me-mei”, a
fruit that tastes a lot like sweet potatoes (or perhaps pumpkin pie
filling). Naturally there was lettuce as well, but I’m found today I
felt like waiting for dinner for a salad.

This afternoon I had a chance to ask Dr. Graham questions about
bananas, receiving tips on how many to buy and how to stage them. He
and his wife go through a case of 100 bananas (about 40 pounds), in
about 3 days. At any particular time they might have two to four
cases in the house in various stages of ripeness.

They use different parts of the house to ripen them, at speeds
necessary to insure a constant stream of ripe bananas. That many
bananas is a 6 to 12 day supply, which they will allow to dwindle in
numbers whenever they’re about to leave on a trip, and they need to
let the number drop to zero by the time they leave.

When the bananas get ahead of them, and too many are ripe at once,
they have an extra banana meal (it’s usually bananas for lunch, so
this means dinner too). Or, perhaps they invite someone over for a
workout and have banana smoothies together afterwards.

When they get ahead of the bananas, and have a shortage, they instead
may have whatever other fruits are in season. In fact, when
persimmons are in season, Doug said he might not even be eating
bananas at all, instead concentrating on persimmons.

Tonight’s dinner started with tomato/orange juice and mangos. Then
there was a big platter of cut vegetables and fruit (pineapple, mango,
papaya, cucumber, and chayote) for dipping in a personal bowl of
sun-dried tomato and red pepper sauce. Skewer sticks were provided,
and it was sort of like fondue, but all ingredients were raw and
remained uncooked. Tasty and light.