GUARD #1: You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together. ARTHUR: So?

Yesterday I made what will probably be one of my last big weekly trips to the market with Elisabeth. When we go to Ganhi, the smaller of the city's two big markets, every street vendor carrying sunglasses, flip-flops, desk lamps, kittens, etc. comes running for us. This makes my presence a real burden when we already have to buy a week's worth of food in the crowded stalls. And I have a tendency to inflate prices. Elisabeth is put in the awkward position of negotiating for the best deal with a "rich" person beside her. Plus I feel absolutely awful about haggling in the first place.

In fact, sometimes there's no deal at all. Take, for example, the pineapples. Elisabeth had warned me that the pineapple lady might not want to sell the pineapples to us if she saw me (she's actually a pineapple wholesaler so she sells at a lower price than in the market and she's rather particular about who she sells to). So I tried to duck down in the back seat of the car as we drove up to the stand. It didn't work. Elisabeth had to call the lady's younger sister (I guess they are friends and that is why Elisabeth can buy wholesale pineapples in the first place) and come back by herself today to get them.

For these reasons I've been kindly asked to stay home on market day. I'll still make it out to the markets, just not to do the weekly food stocking. And then there's all the things that we get at the regular supermarkets that I can still buy myself. Cornflakes, milk and that sort of thing. There are a number of small supermarkets in the neighbourhood and everywhere else for that matter. The selection isn't like Whole Foods or Hannaford (USA), or even Bilka or Føtex (DK), but I will say that it's better than your average American "Mom & Pop" grocer, or Netto or Aldi in Denmark. All in all, finding things in Cotonou has been much easier than finding things in Copenhagen. Very counter-intuitive. Oh, another funny thing: yesterday when we were at a rather nice supermarket, we had to wait a little extra longer at the cheese counter. The reason: we were in line behind the Beninese President's wife, and no one rushes her. My first brush with celebrity in Africa.

But we got everything we needed and now we have a nice pile of pineapples to top it off - as you can see above. Now every morning we can rotate between freshly squeezed orange juice and pineapple juice. We also picked up a "green" coconut on the way home so that T and I could try the milk. Very tasty. I wonder about the fat content of that beverage though. Isn't coconut milk supposed to be very fatty and bad for you? Or is that just the milk of the "dry" coconuts? I just learned the difference between the two yesterday so I obviously don't know much, but Elisabeth told me that the milk is supposed to be very good for your stomach. Well, as long as you don't combine it with yoghurt that is. A few minutes after finishing my glass, she came running back to me to say that she forgot to warn me about it's interaction with yoghurt. Apparently the combination leads to frequent and inescapable trips to the loo. So now I'm trying to figure out if we should put coconut milk into our morning rotation (but not on mornings we eat yoghurt!), or avoid it like a heart attack. Are there any health-nuts out there who can help clear up all these coconut rumours and provide some scientifically-based advice? For all I know, the people I'm listening to could be suggesting that coconuts migrate ;) Well, we do have African swallows here...

*Monty Python and the Holy Grail