fun little guys with question marks

Previously: The Story 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.

4/31/2022 – Independiente De Medellin 0, Atletico National 0

He introduces himself as "Davey." He's wearing a hat that says DO IT IN A VAN, mysteriously, and the first thing he says is that he is very sorry but he is still drunk from last night because it was an American friend's last night in the country. Then he says his girlfriend is going to drive us, and that his girlfriend is not very happy with him. Then he apologizes again because he does not know that these are the three best facts I can learn about the guide of a food tour I'm going on. Tranquilo.

It is immediately apparent that Davey doesn't know anything about food, but this is fine. He says he speaks three languages, "Spanish, English, and bullshit." He takes us to Medellin's main market, where men you must avoid arm-wresting at all costs lug a seemingly infinite variety of products, mostly fruits. Many of these fruits are strange to gringo eyes, and Davey wanders through the market asking for various items and a knife so he can cut them and hand them to us.

These fruits are… unrefined. When you go to an American megamart the things that line the shelves have been relentlessly iterated to strip out things which interfere with the flavor. The Colombian oddities have not gone through this process and can be eye-wateringly tart or mostly seeds or one giant pit with a thin layer of fruit-type substance around it. The usual thing to do is to rhapsodize about the pure untrammeled authenticity of such things, but they're not actually better. We're sampling a smoothie-type thing made from a hard, luridly orangish fruit; Davey's girlfriend questions us about whether we like it, in the way of people who are almost but not quite mutually unintelligible. She makes a face and a sort of money gesture with her hands—she doesn't like the texture. She has a point.

Davey suggests that about half the things he hands to me are aphrodisiacs. He uses his arm to demonstrate their purported effects. He flops his forearm down from the elbow and looks at me, cocking an eyebrow. I nod. There doesn't seem to be anything else I can do.