This lollipop has menthol in it

I take back everything I said about the Halls lollipop being non-mentholated. It absolutely had menthol in it; not as much as a cough drop, but enough that I thought it was pretty gross. It also had a liquid filling that was ostensibly caramel, but really just tasted like more menthol.

In lieu of discussing the wisdom of creating menthol-flavored candy, I'm going to jump in to 'fruits I don't recognize.' Today's entry into that category is the mamey.

The mamey is a fruit native to Mexico. Its full name is the mamey sapote; however, it is apparently unrelated to several other sapotes with the same name, such as the black sapote (also known as 'the fruit that is so acrid when unripe it is used as a fish poison in the Philippines, which I wish we'd known before we tried to eat one'). As you can see from the pictures above, it looks sort of vaguely like a sweet potato with a really big pit. Texture-wise, it actually reminded me of a slightly undercooked sweet potato - it was kind of fibrous and slightly hard. The flavor was vaguely reminiscent of passion fruit, but not as sweet, and it had a slight smell to it of something that had gone a bit off. Since the fruit seller I bought it from was adamant that it would be ripe yesterday, I assume that that off-ness is actually a characteristic of the fruit. I didn't like it very much in fruit form; however, I tried it last week in a pudding, and it was somewhat nicer then. It's also commonly made into drinks - they make pretty much every fruit you can think of into a drink here, which is pretty great - so that might change the flavor as well.

I feel like in all this food talk I'm giving the impression that all I do is waddle from place to place eating. And while that may not be entirely inaccurate, the waddling from place to place raises an important aspect of Mexican life: traffic laws. Traffic laws here appear to be not so much laws as suggestions, really - "you might want to stop driving/walking now, but we can't swear to it." Being a pedestrian here is an extremely unusual experience. Every corner has a walk light, but the relationship between the walk light and the point at which you actually cross the street appears to be largely random. Red lights here seem to function a lot like yellow lights at home - they mainly mean that it's time to speed up to get through the intersection. So just because the light is red and your walk signal is green, you can't assume it's actually time to walk. Nor, under the same circumstances, can you assume that you will not have traffic coming at you from at least three other directions - and if there's anything I've learned about Mexico City drivers, it's that they do not stop or even slow down for pedestrians.

Then there are left turns and u-turns. If you are a driver and you want to make a turn, you don't actually use a turn lane, or go to the nearest light and turn around there. No, you pull into what you hope is a car-sized cutout between your lane of traffic and the oncoming traffic, park yourself at a 90 degree angle to all the other cars, and then - pretty much whenever you feel like - turn into the oncoming traffic. There may or may not be space for your car at that point, but you're taking it anyway. I'm becoming convinced that the more or less constant car horns have more to do with this particularly creative technique for turns than they do anything else.