There are no beaches in Belize and Michigan smells like hot dog.

Two weeks ago I was eating real fruit.  I was also eating plantain chips, tortillas, beans, and apparently anything else I could get my hands on.  I’ve just returned from an excellent trip to Belize and in every photo, I’m eating.  To be fair, my sister realized that she was capturing most of my eating moments on camera as we were on our trip, and then to be unfair, she made it her personal goal to accumulate as many as possible.  I now have a library of myself with my mouth open.

We didn’t realize that Belize lacked the tropical vacation staple, the beach, until we arrived.  Shoreline, yes, beach, no. After double-checking in the Lonely Planet book for pages that may have described this but were accidentally stuck together like the ones that caused Rachel to layer ground beef between lady fingers and whipped cream on the classic 1999 episode of Friends, we iterated on our intentions and embraced our adventure.

Nice beak! Lots of room for food.

Face down in warm water, our snorkel-enhanced faces watched a sea turtle mow a lawn of seagrass in slow motion.  The sea turtle made me feel better about myself.  Both of us were eating.  Belize is known for its birds, and it turns out that they love eating too.  The state of Michigan and Belizian wildlife both eat a lot, and there I was, suspended between two worlds.

My mouth was open again as my plane neared Grand Rapids and hugged the Lake Michigan shoreline.  There they were: miles and miles of beaches.

On my first day back to work I rode my bike home and took a big whiff of Michigan: hot dog.  I won’t ever compare to real smell savants, but I know pink pleasure as it wafts up my nostrils.  I was ‘home.’  But the Michigander Fairy wasn’t done with me. I walked downtown to meet a friend for a drink and on the way I encountered this:

This is Holland, Michigan.

I’ve been in a daze lately.  I started to think that my life here in Michigan is normal, but no – papaya, pineapple, and cantaloupe all taste different in real life.  Real life fruit is drippy, soft, and unexpectedly amazing to those of us that usually have to get it at grocery stores in Michigan.    It took a trip to Central America and another to Starbucks to wake me up.  I bought a fruit cup from Starbucks on a connection through Dallas on my flight home.  This fruit cup had ingredients – ingredients! And, there was one I didn’t recognize: Ver 2.  What?  I am not even going to give it the time of day to look it up.  I know that Ver 2 makes fruit taste like chemical.  Fruit, version 2. Fruit 2.0.

I’m a fan of prototyping, but there are certain things that do not call for iteration.

Fruit, version 2.