Project 365: 05/11/2010 – 07/11/2010

Chinola disaster: 05/11/2010 - 07/11/2010

THE GREAT CHINOLA BOMB OF 2010:

A few weeks ago some folks from my region came and visited my site to go hang out in the river and have a good time. Sabrina has an enamorada, which is Spanish for “in love with her” and Dominican for “OMG YOU TALKED TO ME LETS GET MARRIED!”, and he gave her four 24 oz. bottles full of passionfruit innards, the stuff to make delicious juice with. We used one bottle (SO GOOD) and I gave away two of them, and had one leftover. Well two days later I leave for la capital to take Tanuki to the vet and see the new volunteers who are going to swear in but while on the guagua I get a call that we have a mandatory meeting in the capital a few days later to talk about cholera and how to prevent it. Bueno, so I decide to stay two days more. Then as I’m at the Peace Corps office getting ready to go we get another call: we’re being consolidated in hotels while Hurricane Tomas swings by.

Bueennnooo. So I’m out of my site for a little less than two weeks getting stir crazy in a hotel and having a blast and meeting new volunteers and having mini dance parties and generally a good time. Finally FINALLY I get home about a week and a half later than I thought, which is fine because my fridge is broke anyway and I had no food left out that could rot PLUS I even bothered to clean everything and my floors before I left because I’m that good, right?

Except then there is the bottle of passionfruit that sat, capped, on my dining room table for a little less than 2 weeks.

Now let’s see, you have raw fruit in a closed container that’s kept at roughly 80 degrees for two weeks. Raw fruit which was exposed to air which inevitably contains yeast spores. Yeast loves sugar. Yeast turns sugar into carbon dioxide gas. Gas puts pressure on the bottle, which can’t really absorb the pressure because it was nearly full of incompressible passionfruit innards in the first place. There is a LOT of sugar in raw passionfruit (chinola)

I inadvertently made a bomb. A chinola bomb. La Bomba Grande de Chinola.

I get home expecting to have a relaxing time, opening my windows and getting settled. I walk through my door and what do I find? CHINOLA EVERYWHERE. An unmitigated disaster that left me first pissed off thinking someone broke in, and then, when I found the pieces of the plastic bottle EVERYWHERE including the next room over because it ricocheted off the wall, I was a puddle of laughter for several minutes. The explosion of the bottle had apparently blown EVERYTHING off the table, upturning all my tea lights, knocking a bag of paper napkins on the floor, almost knocking over my silverware container (fairly heavy), blowing an ashtray across the room, lighters and matches to the floor. As you can see from the picture above. Even better is that the fermented passionfruit ended up everywhere, on the ceiling on the walls dripping down in chunky bits on the floor on every chair I had on the table on the fridge… what color did I want my walls to be? Oh passionfruit color is fine for me, yes yes.

I spent the next two hours scraping off the dried fermented passionfruit from everything in my dining room, my walls, my furniture, my windows, bleaching everything I could because the juice had stained everything, discovering that my cement walls only have a thin layer of primer paint on them and thus I am unable to remove the passionfruit stains because the absorbed and now my wall is part cement part passionfruit, trying to keep Tanuki from eating the 100′s of passionfruit seeds scattered all over my floor… ay yi yi, I have never used so much cleaning water in my life.

On the plus side, depending on the angle you view it from and the ambient lighting, my wall either looks like a crime scene from a grisly murder of someone who has orange blood and brains, or a Pollock painting. And Tanuki has discovered that she loves passionfruit, so she’s doing a good job of licking and eating the remainder off my walls. By the time I leave she will have probably cleaned off everything up to 4 feet high on my walls.

Sorry for missing pictures of the 5th and 6th… was still in the hotel and there was NOTHING interesting. More pictures of the Great Chinola Bomb afteraffects:

The table, cleared: 05/11/2010 - 07/11/2010

It actually blew the tea lights out of their holders.

Oh the towelmanity!: 05/11/2010 - 07/11/2010

The towels, blown to the floor.

Oh the chinolanity!: 05/11/2010 - 07/11/2010

Such a fucking lucha to clean this up. You have no idea.

THE CEILING IS COVERED IN SEEDS: 05/11/2010 - 07/11/2010

These seeds are never coming off my ceiling.