Inquisitiveness

Starting to live in a foreign country feels a bit like being one of the central characters in a role playing game. Inquisitiveness is often rewarded by answers, but not always immediately.

Suze fancied getting some marmalade. But for a country that is swimming with fruit trees, and has regions growing oranges galore, we couldn't see any marmalade for sale. Until Jon spotted "Marmelada" in Lidl, and we thought we had cracked it. Okay, the product was being sold in a plastic oblong tray, no problem. But when we opened it up the texture was more like a paste, and it didn't taste like oranges, though it was sweet and not unpleasant. Strangest marmalade we had ever eaten.

We have to collect our post from the post box that is 300m up the track, where all the other post boxes for this quinta are located. On the way there, Jon spotted a fruit tree bearing something that looks like apples. We took one to inspect more closely, under the knife. Okay, we scrumped it from the neighbours.

Inside, the fruit was different to an apple as it had no central core though it did have one or two pips. It wasn't ripe just yet either, so we didn't fancy having a taste.

In the post box we get junk mail. Some from our redirected mail in the UK, and some of it more local. We don't actually mind, as we are saving it up for when we need to start lighting the Rayburn. Our favourite junk mail are the supermarket flyers (eg Intermarche, Ecomarche) that come in full colour, with pages about the size of The Guardian. Not only do they tell you what offers are coming to the supermarkets soon, they have beautiful pictures of the goods in question with their name.

So, imagine our childish delight when we positively identified the mystery scrumped fruit as a "Marmelo". A quick Google and we learned that the marmelo is what we know as quince.

The end of this little story is when we were out with an estate agent. He was a lovely chatty fellow with very good English. Somehow we found ourselves discussing marmelos, and Humberto began telling us how they are used. A kilo of chopped marmelo to a kilo of sugar, cooked until tender, becomes a pulp.

He must have thought we were both odd as we suddenly became very animated and explained that the Marmelada we had bought, must be made from the marmelo and not oranges. Humberto nodded at us, yes, marmelada is made from marmelo.

Closer inspection of the tub of marmelada this morning, and the key ingredient is "polpa do marmelo". Obvious, now that we know!

We haven't given up on the marmalade hunt yet. That's another thing we have learned in the last four weeks, the supermarkets complement one another very well. Between them they sell most things that we could wish for. Intermarche, Ecomarche and Mini Preco have a more extensive range, and now we have located the stores we are far more successful on our shopping trips. And if we can't find marmalade, or even if we can, we might just make our own marmalades, lemon, lime, orange...