Spain, New Pawpaws, Scale Insects

We just got back from a two week trip to Spain. NJ was traveling there for work and I tagged along. Her conference was in Madrid, and we also went to Granada where we saw the Alhambra, to Malaga where we swam in the Mediterranean, and to Toledo where we enjoyed the most picturesque streets and buildings while feeling some degree of desperation regarding the general lack of restrooms available to visitors to the town.

Here are a couple of fruit-oriented pictures from Spain and a few pictures of the pawpaws now that we've made it back and can see how they've been developing this year.

Especially in Granada we saw a lot of orange trees, which we learned the Arabs brought to Spain centuries ago because of the smell of the blossoms. They do have great smelling blossoms. We were disappointed that all of the oranges, which looked ripe, were out of our reach. But after church on Sunday we were walking away from the chapel and found some trees outside of the tourist section. These trees had oranges we could reach. This was great, since I had told NJ that my fondest desire while in the town where the Alhambra is located, would be to eat a true Spanish orange. We split one, and tasted the vast difference between an improved culinary orange and an orange that is planted just for the smell of its flowers. The orange tasted like a bitter grapefruit (not a standard grocery store grapefruit but a bitter grapefruit). As I said to NJ after we achieved my fondest desire by eating the orange: the unimproved pawpaw is in very little need of improvement compared to the unimproved orange!

In Malaga we went to a fish and fruit market, and although we like both fish and fruit, we gravitated to the fruit. We saw dragon fruit and mangosteens and big grapes and peaches and a kind of fruit that was locally in season called the niparo (later we learned the common name in English is the loquat--but not that common, since we hadn't heard the name before, nor had we seen the fruit). While cruising around the market, we stopped at one stall and I touched a peach to see how ripe it was (it wasn't). And then I picked up the peach, and soon the proprietor of the stall was yelling, saying, "Oiga. Oiga! Oiga!! OIGA!!!" Finally on the last loud  "OIGA!!! (LISTEN!!!)," I realized he was yelling at me. And I remembered something that a friend had warned me about a couple months earlier: when in Spain, you can't go around just touching the fruit that's on sale because people get mad. I found this to be true, and I said, "Lo siento" and put the peach down. It's kind of ironic to say "Lo siento" when you're being yelled at for feeling fruit, since "lo siento" means "sorry," but literally it means "I feel it," which is exactly what the good man was yelling at me not to do.

After I was yelled at, we moved on to another stall and bought some niparos, since we wanted to try them. They were 1.50 euros/kilo. And we didn't know if one kilo would be enough (we're such optimists--we might have worried, instead, that one kilo would be too much). So we bought two. And as the man filled a heaping bag, I was reminded that a kilo is quite a big larger than a pound. So we found a bench and sat down and ate probably a kilo of niparos, which reminded me of kiwis, before leaving the remaining kilo of niparos on the bench in the hopes that someone else would find them and enjoy them.

While we were in Spain, we heard from my parents that the talavera plate we had bought in Puebla, Mexico, had fallen (spontaneously!) from the wall and broken on our tile floor. Oh how sad we felt! But they saved the pieces and, if the plate had to die, we're glad it's now reincarnated as a set of potsherds adorning NJ's mother's day present.

Okay, so I know several of you have been looking forward to seeing whether the fruit has set on the pawpaw trees this year. It has! It's fun to check the trees day by day (as I do when I'm here), but it's also fun to be away and see the development that takes place over the course of two weeks. And so, without further adieu (I'm just kidding--I know it's ado), I present to you some exquisite pawpaw pictures:

Click on them and they look even more exquisite.

So fun for me to see so many pawpaws growing on the trees!

But the fly in the ointment was that I found some scale insects in the pawpaw orchard. Not many--maybe five on the Shenandoah, three on the KSU-Atwood, and none on the Wells (though I admit I was tired of looking by then, and the low numbers hardly made it feel like an infestation).

I'm rethinking this sentence, which I used just a few lines above: "But the fly in the ointment was that I found some scale insects in the pawpaw orchard." My goals in life aren't exceptionally lofty--my fondest desire in Granada, after all, was to eat a true Spanish orange. But here's one of my loftiest goals, and if it's achieved at some point, the purposes of this blog will largely be accomplished: for the phrase "scale insects in the pawpaw orchard" to replace or at least compete with the phrase "fly in the ointment" as a metaphor for an otherwise good situation that is spoiled by some minor problem. For instance, I would like to be widely understood if I were to say something like this: "When it came to that wonderful fruit market in Malaga, the true scale insect in the pawpaw orchard was when the proprietor yelled at me for touching the peach."