Kumquat. What, What!

This is a kumquat. It's in a tea cup. It's cute.

And it's a for real fruit! Five days ago the only thing I knew about "kumquat" is that it's a funny word to call someone. That's all. If I had to take a multiple choice test and the question was "What is a kumquat" I might have gotten it right, depending on the other choices.

I probably would have picked "fairy tale villain" and "1970s anime character" over "a fruit" but other than that I think I would have come out on top. But if it was a fill in the blank test I would have been at a loss. And I never would have guessed a kumquat looks exactly like an orange for dolls. Who would think a fruit with such a sweet, sweet name would be such a poser in the looks department?

For lunch there is occasionally dessert and sometimes that dessert is fresh fruit. Fresh fruit days are always good days. When I looked down at my lunch tray and saw two mini oranges all I could say was kawaii (cute). The office lady informed me that it's called kinkan. Awesome. No idea what it was but at least I knew it's name.

As I watched the students eat their kinkan I gleaned nothing further about my mystery fruit. Most students looked like they were just eating the peel. Weird. A couple were peeling their kinkan only to be laughed at by the other students. A kid next to me was eating the whole thing, making a terrible face. The other students were laughing at him and shouting oishii?! ("is it good?!") As I do with anything in a wrapper (the fresh fruit comes packaged to guarantee freshness) I took the tiny oranges back to my desk. I'd give it a try when I got home.

The teacher in the desk next to mine happens to be one of the English teachers and was eating her kinkan. She saw mine on my desk and pointed it out, asking if I could eat kinkan. Well, I said, I don't know. I've never eaten one before. At this Andou Sensei got out her Japanese-English electronic dictionary and I was introduced to the fruit kumquat! I couldn't hold in the laughter. Kumquat. A tiny orange. Just great.

Apparently kumquats are very good for you, especially the peel. The fruit, however, is a very bitter-sour taste, akin to grapefruit on steroids I would say. The peel is even less thick than a clementine peel and tastes just like the fruit of an orange. I was told that Japanese people eat kumquats as a snack and also use the peel in homeopathic medicine.

After trying my first ever kumquat I heard a bunch of laughter and exclamations of nihonjin janai (not a Japanese person). Apparently the head teacher of the second year students had never eaten a kumquat before and, like a a couple of the students I ate with, tried to peel it and eat the insides. His response to their exclamation was to question the logic of a fruit of which you eat only the peel, his closing argument being that "Japanese people are strange."

Kumquat. Best lunch ever.