Little pick-me-up on the way to work?
Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 2:18PM ;)
Among the myriad of vendors selling things on the side of the road you can find a guy with a whole handful of what look like little satchels made out of leaves. They're only a couple inches long and they're tied at the top with some fiber from some bush or tree. They contain something - I don't think you can open it without destroying it.
It's prudent to start low when buying things on the side of the road, so I handed a vendor 100 Shillings, about 5 cents. There was no haggling - 5 cents bought me two of these little bags of what turned out to be sun-dried coffee beans. No, not roasted beans, not chocolate-covered beans. ;)
Just sun-dried coffee beans still in their "shell." When I got home I asked Rasul, the young man who works at our apartment, what to do with these little bags of coffee beans. We each took a bag and he showed me how to break open the shell of the coffee bean and chew the bean itself. It's a messy process 'cause you have a lot of shell pieces left over and you can spit out the bean itself after chewing it.
If I had a commute longer than the walk from my bedroom to my desk in the living room, I'd probably pick up one of these on my way to work. It's kinda the local equivalent of the Starbucks drive-through... okay, at 5 cents for 2, maybe it's the McDonald's drive-through. -Shauen