By Jaime Jaramillo, October 13, 2019 — I’ll never forget how we would leave school as kids and on our walks we would buy mangos.
It’s so funny because in retrospect those mangos were so unsanitary. In Colombia on every block, you can buy some kind of delicious food from a vendor. You’ll find chorizo, arepas, empanadas, any delicious fruit you might crave. It’s so good. Here you just get McDonalds. It sucks. Anyway, the people who sold the mango would cut it into little thin strips- it would look like spaghetti. And they do the whole thing in a little plastic bag, the one they sell it to you in. This way you get all the juice that comes out of the mango when they cut it up. We would buy that mango and slurp the juice right out of the bag, too. You chew on the seed until there’s nothing else left on it.
Well, this is the nasty part. The vendors never wore gloves or anything, so not only is whatever germs they carry on their hands, but they also dealt with money all day. So here we are giving this man coins and he counts them and does all his business with them and then proceeds to deal with our mango. Oh my god! It sounds so nasty now, but we use to go in on those mangos! And we never got sick.