I’m not even sure when and how it started, it may have been since I moved to Cape Town as coconut and New York doesn’t really seem to work well together, but I can’t really point a date and time. Come to think of it, I did start a quite obsessive love affair with coconut water already back in NY as they would sell it at my yoga studio. The best thing ever to hydrate, I would gulp down a tetra pack before class and probably two after and in between when a shopping marathon proved to tiresome.
Can you imagine my excitement when I went for strolls in the Seychelles and they would sell fresh coconut water in shell and all at the side of the road? I must have been too excited as I managed to schlep a 1.5kg coconut drink around for about an hour while slowly savouring it.
Life Lesson 1:
It’s very exhausting to carry a coconut and drinking the water will not make up for sore arms the next day.
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| Not the right kind of coconut for eating, but makes for a more dramatic picture. |
Life Lesson 2:
Even in a fight 100-year old tortoise against falling coconut, the coconut wins. True story, I saw the surviving tortoise and she did not look pretty.
I was staying far away from any trees and would just quickly run towards a coconut, grab it and dash away. Back at the guest house I would spend hours trying to bash it open, which becomes the ultimate DIY project if you don’t have a hammer or whatever professional coconut-opening-equipment there is. It is however a very satisfying way to spend an evening when you only have one TV channel in French. The reward is a fresh coconut snack and when no one else is around, you can actually pretend it tastes so much better than the pre-cut coconut you can buy at a store and that it was worth chipped nails and the trouble you got for bashing in a tile on the veranda.
Life Lesson 3:
See above. Maybe if you pretend long enough that it was worth it, you can at least convince your friends when telling vacation stories.
I however was not put off and my love for anything with coconut in it has continued. Bread, cake, macaroons – you name it. About two years ago, I discovered something else coconut related – Coco Extreme. A fragrance which smells of nothing but coconut and sun tan lotion and beach (A Thai hooker or boozy Malibu smell comes to mind if you wanted to be mean). A fragrance which goes perfectly with summer for obvious reasons, but also works in winter if you need a reminder that there will be a summer again sometime soon.
The other day a friend came to my house and she used my bathroom for, I guess the most elegant way is to say, a Number Two. She came out, closed the door and I interjected, saying she should rather leave it open and we would air out the flat. She said it wasn’t so bad as she has used my air freshener. I was a bit puzzled as I don’t use air freshener ever. I prefer matches. Guess what – a really expensive French fragrance can in an emergency situation a) be mistaken for air freshener and b) quite adequately do the job too. That is if you don’t believe like I do, that any kind of fruity air freshener only makes the smell worse. So I literally twice as now the coco smell was, true to its name, very extreme in my bathroom and well, my friend had just sprayed about $5 worth of fragrance into the air.
Life Lesson 4:
Don’t leave any fragrance that doesn’t come in a chic glass bottle and spells Chanel, Gucci or Dior on top of the toilet.
Lessons learned. Yet my love for coconut remains as unbroken as most of them I attempted to break.
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