Rwanda through food: B--Beer & Bananas

Some of the advice most often repeated by experienced travelers is to always get bottled water, but also consider beer, which is usually cheaper. Rwanda obliges with two tasty, local, and widely-available beers:

Mutzig

Primus

I was sure to take pictures of the beers (at separate meals) when I remembered to specify "small,"" petite" or used hand gestures to suggest squashing a gigantic bottle down to regular size. In the absence of these clarifications, you can easily end up with an enormous beer bottle cracked opened just as it arrives in front of you. I feel like they might be the size of wine bottles, but that could be a bit of misremembering... drafts also seem to come in two sizes, plenty and huge. Heineken is everywhere, and I've been given directions to a few different places along the lines of "go until you see the Heineken sign,, then..." Amstel light and Guinness have made guest appearances on a few menus. Mutzig and Primus suit me just fine.

Other advice, a veritable mantra among the occupational clinic nurses, is: "boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it." This is to remind you you're not in Kansas anymore, and whatever guts it takes to travel, you should probably aim to preserve them. Bananas conveniently fit in the peel it category.

Bananas from the local market.

But don't be fooled, they are tiny--fitting in the palm of my hand!

Actually it's exactly the right amount of banana, no halves left on the counter to brown. At one conference center we've been to a few times, they are served with the buffet lunch as a desert. Perfect.

I recently found out from a colleague that banana trees grow extremely quickly, produce fruit within the year, then kind of fade away again just as quickly. From another colleague i cound out that the Kinyarwanda word for banana tree is also (pronounced just slightly differently) the word for fingers. Random, but true.