It wasn’t an instant love, the first piece of dragon fruit I had was on the plane ride to Thailand. The small square white piece of fruit with little black seeds in it reminded me of kiwi, but tasted nothing like it. In fact I thought it tasted rather bland. While we were in Pattaya I didn’t search it out or think much of it, frankly we were too busy eating other fresh fruits to really care. Then the ladies that we had been working with had prepared a dinner for us during our last week of ministry and my interest was peeked. I found out that dragon fruit can be purple or white. Purple may taste better, but also it also costs more, stains, and can cause unnecessary concerns in its colorful digestive results. I haven’t been able to differentiate the difference from the outer skin, both appear to have the same exotic and alluring look.
After Thailand we traveled to Cambodia where dragon fruit was plentiful and I could easily walk to the market and get 3 for 1.2 USD! I wasn’t sure if our next country (China) would have such fruit, so I relished the availability and an obsession was formed. To my surprise dragon fruit was sold in Beijing! I bought a couple of them, took one to the Great Wall in case I needed a snack and then saved the others 
for the Philippines. The fruit survived baggage checks and weight shuffles from China and Hong Kong. I was going to be able to have dragon fruit on Christmas…so I thought. But a week of waiting around to be eaten didn’t bode well for freshness. I kissed my fruit good bye as two departed into the trash and one to a squad white elephant-gift. Yay for Julie! I’m such a giver. ( :
Then to my joyous surprise, as you’ve seen in the video, we found DRAGON FRUIT!! I found out that some of the adult staff hadn’t had or even heard of dragon fruit before. This wasn’t really surprising since the fruit was a rare and relatively expensive find. I thought it would be fun to share some with the Children’s Home so I took some fruit over. What a joy to spread the love of dragon fruit!
Maricel playing with the dragon fruit before we peel it open.
