We’re back from Vancouver with some good contraband. On Wednesday took the Aquabus to Granville Island. Iris loved Granville Island, partly because when we said we were taking a ferryboat to the Island, she said, “Just like Frog!” There’s a Frog and Toad story where Frog wants to spend some time alone, so he goes and sits on an island. So presumably Iris was imagining an island of a few square feet in the middle of a pond where she could sit in solitude.

Instead, she ran around the public market building, got extremely rained on, and played at the Kids Market. We played many games of Skee-Ball and won a slinky. I also loved the Island, because I went to Oyama Sausage, which has the most incredible charcuterie case I’ve ever seen. We needed snacks for the trip back. How to decide? I ended up getting some spicy wild boar salami and goose breast prosciutto. The goose prosciutto was especially good, and it tasted remarkably similar to ham. Similar enough, in fact, that when we got to the border, I declared our meats, and our remaining salami was confiscated, but the prosciutto was waved through on the grounds that, “The prosciutto is okay because it’s just ham.”

I also stopped at South China Seas Trading Co, a small Asian imports store that seems to specialize in products that are hard to find elsewhere. They had beautiful looking fresh kaffir limes and, amazingly, fresh green peppercorns. I have been missing fresh peppercorns since our last visit to Thailand in 2001, and here they are. I don’t know if it’s illegal to import them, but I conveniently forgot to mention them at the border, so now they’re in my fridge. I keep reaching in, twisting off peppercorns, and snacking on them. A fresh green peppercorn tastes like a mild tropical fruit (such as green papaya) infused with black pepper. Tomorrow I’m going to put them into a curry.

Note the fresh chilaca peppers on the right; these are the fresh version of dried pasillas. Since I haven’t been to Mexico (other than Tijuana), I’ve never seen them *anywhere* before.

This is not my first adventure with potentially illegal peppercorns, but it’s the best yet.