Madeira, m'dear?

We've travelled through some of the great petty-theft centres of the world. Rome, Madrid, Lisbon; we've walked, taxied and tubed through them all and never lost a penny. In fact, we've become a little smug, thinking ourselves to be impervious to even the best Fagin. But then we were mugged by Madeiran fruit sellers.

Yesterday in Funchal, Madeira's ultra-safe capital, we visited the Mercado dos Lavradores and shopped for fruit. Here, the weary traveler walks a daunting gauntlet of sellers who use cunning and deception to attract him to their stalls; they say things like "good afternoon, sir, would you like to try a passion fruit?" and "please feel free to sample a pear-banana." It's terrifying, and we found ourselves at a passion-fruit stall where we were mercilessly pressed to try sample after sample of some of the most delicious fruit we have ever tasted. After choosing five or six pieces of fruit for us, the seller let us go - for fifteen Euros, or about 22 dollars. Well, we'd been caught be surprise, and the fruit was good; but we're not the kind of travellers to be cheated twice. Four stalls further down, we bought an avacodo for ten dollars.

We also bought the interesting object posted below: a kind of pineapple about the same size and shape as a banana that is nothing short of miraculous. It's covered in hexagonal scales that fall off as the fruit ripens, which it does from top to bottom at the rate of about two inches a day. Each day, therefore, the fruit reveals just a few kernels of perfectly ripened flesh, a kind of slow-motion, fruity, strip-tease.



We've come to Madeira to recover from an incredible week in La Alberca, Spain. We spent the week at Pueblo Ingles, a language school that promises complete immersion in English to Spaniards, who, for reasons commercial, emotional and perverse wish to improve their English. We Anglos, as we were called, were fed and housed for free in exchange for about 15 hours a day of English conversation with Spaniards who paid in excess of 4500 dollars for the privilege. Sounds pretty labourious, but we had one of the best weeks of our lives here, bonding with men and women who are genetically incapable of being anything less than charming. I haven't danced in at least fifteen years, but at La Alberca, we danced and drank until three, four in the morning. Man, those Spaniards know how to party.

Oh, and the avacodo was worth every penny.