What IS it?

Saturday was gorgeous here (and now it's FREEEEZING!!) so we spent the morning outside at the market. There wasn't anything we had to get but thought we'd walk around anyway.

We had no idea that there was an event happening in the city until we got there. We saw horses and carriages and bands. Here is the first one we saw.

After seeing this we wondered if it all had to do with "sinterklaas", the dutch version of Santa. For those of you new to reading our blog you may have missed the blog explaining this holiday. To read about it click here.

After finding out it was all for Sinterklaas' arrival we chose to just walk around the food market. If Ella was a bit older and understood what was happening we would have gone to the river to see him arriving by boat. Instead we found these....

Since they had a sample we could try we took advantage of it. It tasted pretty good even though we were both thinking "What IS it?".  When we got home we googled (thank god for the internet) "kaki" and found this:

Kaki, better known as Japanese Persimmon, a fruit tree.

So then.....stupid me needed to google persimmon because I had never heard of that either!! And found this: (thank you Wikipedia)

A persimmon is the edible fruit of a number of species of trees in the genus Diospyros in the ebony wood family . The word Diospyros means "the fire of Zeus" in ancient Greek.  As a tree, it is a perennial plant. The word persimmon is derived from putchamin, pasiminan, or pessamin, from Powhatan, an Algonquian language of the  eastern United States,  meaning "a dry fruit". Persimmons are generally light yellow-orange to dark red-orange in color, and depending on the species and may be spherical, acorn-, or pumpkin-shaped. Like the tomato, it is not considered a "common berry", but is in fact a "true berry" by definition.

For those of you who have never eaten one it has the texture of a tomato but tastes more like a cantaloupe.  Even Ella liked it! One of the joys of living in a different country.....you try things even when you have no idea what it is!