Monday, April 25, 2016

Drink lime juice. It's good for you.

You told me an interesting story about someone in the village giving you lime juice and you not being able to choke it down. Come on! I'm the first to admit lime juice is an acquired taste, like lots of things we experience in Sri Lanka. It tastes a little bit like salty sewage water, dank, cranky, sour. But it is deeply refreshing and deeply appropriate to the place where we are. The day is pretty much over for all intents and purposes at ten, more like nine actually, because the sun is hot and it just gets hotter. That hotness is something that grows and grows. But some people have to keep working through the day. I've watched them carefully. Once when the day got demanding and the heat seemed to be hours from breaking I observed as Prince had a glass next to him at the desk. It was a lime juice. No ice, no sugar is the way you drink it. You need to use control and sip it slowly, offering it to your body slowly, to restore yourself. Lime juice is a kind of healthy Gatorade, not "cooling" like a king coconut, but strengthening. The salt replaces electrolytes you've been shedding since dawn, or maybe that you already shed overnight as you were sweating into your pillow. It's not yummy delicious or sweet fizzy like the lime soda you say is your fallback drink. But I take my clue for the people here. 

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