My Colombian friend Manolo was telling me a story. “So I’m eating mango,” he said, “and I’m getting close to the bottom of the bag—“ And I stopped him here because I’ve never quite understood this fruit-in-a-bag business so common in Colombia. You can buy almost any prepared tropical fruit on a street corner in Colombia and it almost always comes cut up pleasantly, and served out of a plastic baggie.

“Whats up with that?” I asked. “Why do they always serve fruit in bags?”

Manolo responded saying, “Why not dude? It’s easy and well…” He stared up at a street corner in downtown Cali, as if the English word he was searching for was etched into the second story balcony. “It’s easy and it’s cheap.”

“So what if it’s cheap,” I said, “seashells are cheap and I don’t see anyone selling mango out of them. Is that the rule now? Anything that’s cheap is good to serve mango out of? Plastic bags are for less delicate things like bagels, or rocks. Mango needs to be in a cup or, better, a plastic to-go container.” Maybe it was just the first-world-idiot in me coming out, I don’t know. And for the record, I eat mango from bags all the time and just enjoyed giving Manolo a hard time.

“So I’m eating the mango,” he continued. “And I’m getting close to the bottom of the bag. And I go to pull out a piece,” and he paused here allowing some anticipation to build. “But instead I pull out…a band-aid.”

I wanted to hurl right there in the gutter. Hearing this was not unlike seeing a slaughterhouse expose for the first time in that my mind raced back endlessly to the hundreds, if not thousands of times I’d eaten mango from a bag in Central America. I immediately began moving my fingers the way you do when you’re doing mathematics in your head. By all accounts and measures, I settled on the number forty, as in forty used band-aids had I consumed in my lifetime. There are the rumors you hear in cyberspace and gym locker rooms: the fried rat discovered in a bucket of KFC, the human eye identified in a can of Campbell’s clam chowder. And then there are the rumors, like this one, that hit a little too close to home.

“Well,” I had to ask. “Was it…used?”

Manolo said that it was, the words making me throw up a little bit in my mouth. I was so surprised because, notwithstanding Manolo’s incident, Cali (and Colombia in general) street food is surprisingly sanitary and presentable. Tell me you found a bullet in your Cristorey hamburger or a razor blade in your Las Tres Cruces taco and I’d chuckle. But a bloody band-aid in a bag of mainstream street mango: its as if Jessica Simpson suddenly went lesbian. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, which is, I suppose, what makes the most heinous crimes so scary.

It took me a few days, but before you knew it, I was back at my local street vendor. Manolo might tell another gringo friend this story and drive him to abandon Colombian produce all together. But not me. I’ve fallen off a horse in Colombia before. I’ll continue to buy street mango as long as I’m around, with a careful eye, of course, on what exactly's inside.

Colombia food is a relatively simple and straightforward fare derived from the land and sea. For breakfast food, Colombians enjoy fruit, juice, bread, and one of any million fried foods that exists in that particular house/restaurant’s arsenal: empanadas (fried pockets of flour or corn), carimanolas (fried yucca stuffed with meat or cheese), chorizo. For lunch and dinner food, you’ll find soup, rice/beans, salad, and some sort of protein (chicken, beef, pork, fish). Almost all imported foods are accessible in Colombia’s big cities, while rural destinations are more limited. Try the local plantains, chilies, cilantro, and fresh fruit (pineapple, papaya, mango, watermelon, cantaloupe).

Before my first experience with Colombia food, I began hearing from friends I hadn’t seen in years: like someone had passed away or I’d won the lottery. A rumor had made it around that I’d be traveling south and, in an effort to cash in, a number of people contacted me, starting with some insincere salutation followed by the heart of the matter – a request for something as a gift.

This has always bothered me, the need for people to request gifts when you travel: as if your good fortune is somehow to blame for their tedium. It’s as if some sort of compensation is necessary to put things on a level playing field when you return. I generally oblige and pick up whatever is requested. Victoria Secret underwear from the States, packs of world-renowned coffee from Panama.

“Oh, and by the way,” they were saying, “if you happen to stop in a grocery store, could you pick me up some Colombia food? A few packs of Colombia hot chocolate?”

“If you happen to stop in a grocery store.” It was made out to sound heartfelt and unobtrusive, but as I’d soon find out, bringing back hot chocolate from Colombia isn’t as simple as just happening in on a grocery store. The brick-like packages are deceptively heavy and nearly impossible to pack into your luggage without eliciting some sort of suspicious pat down from airport personnel. Is there a reason you are transporting what appear to be twenty blocks of cement?

Colombia hot chocolate was the most requested item followed closely in second by drugs. There was one friend who asked if I could order a meal at a traditional fonda, wrap it up, and bring it back to her in Panama. “I’ll understand if it’s cold by then,” she said. “But that coconut rice. I need to have it in my body.” It was an interesting way of explaining her desire. And it worked.

The Colombia food requested is decidedly Latin with what some call European (and I call boring) accents. There are afro-Caribbean flavors that are noticeable in lots of dishes as well as customary Latin flare. It’s not the most cutting-edge culinary background ever: nothing as inimitable as Mexican moles or gaucho-style Argentinean meat. Colombian food is a bit more bland and while the nation is emerging in cosmopolitan parts as a culinary breeding ground, more of the iconic plates tend to be pretty straightforward.

There’s sancocho, Colombia food’s version of your Jewish mother’s chicken soup. It’s eaten mainly for lunch and served alongside rice and a wedge of lime. Consider also the arepa: fried dough stuffed with wonderful things. In Colombia, they’re everywhere and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t eat at least eight hundred. The first arepa I ever had was in Panama. A woman was selling them at 4 AM outside of a local brothel and I remember it vividly not because the meat was succulent or the corn was crispy. It was because I shared a bottle of hot sauce with a real live hooker.

Colombia food isn’t particularly healthy, nor has the world health craze fully grasped the country’s general public. When there is any doubt as to how to prepare something in Colombia, it’s safest fried in oil. The full on Colombian fried fest (including fried chorizo, pork rinds, and tortillas) reminds me of a newsreel I once saw about America’s unhealthiest food. It was a cheeseburger sold at a baseball game, which used Krispy Kreme donuts instead of bread. The burger was estimated to run around 1500 calories, something my Colombian friends just might like to try.

I remember a friend once telling me about how he used to buy drugs in New York City. “I’d call this number, give them a password, and soon enough,” he said, “a delivery guy would show up at my door with like fifteen different types of weed.” I envisioned this man as a house-call doctor, the astute kind they used in the olden days with a white coat and a briefcase-like box of medicine, until I found out they were usually poorly dressed undergrad students at NYU and more often than not, stoned.

It’s not difficult for those who haven’t been there to imagine Colombia as a culture revolving around drugs. And it was sitting in a restaurant in Cartagena when my visiting friend from the US misinterpreted a Lebanese tobacco pipe for a marijuana bong. “I didn’t know the drug rules were so relaxed here,” he said. “Hey, how much do you think one of those costs?”

Like, I imagine, a number of foreigners, Dan saw Colombia as a drug wonderland where marijuana grows on street shrubs and paper sacks of cocaine sit alongside supermarket flour. And in this sense, it can be a bit of a let down to find that most of civilized Colombia is no more drug-oriented than your typical cities in the US.

This analogy runs parallel to a time in Bogota when I met a duo of bilingual teenagers in the drug store. They had started the conversation by practicing the basics, “hello,” “how are you?” and our discussion somehow made its way to celebrities in the USA. “You say you from New York. Please tell me, do you know the Puff Daddy?”

“Yes,” another one of them added. “Do you make friends with the Michael Jordan or the Puff Daddy?” I remember it so vividly because I felt expected to relate closely to one of these two celebrities, as if they were political parties or an argument on abortion.

I told them I didn’t know either but if it was any consolation, that one time I shared an elevator with Spike Lee. The flipside was, living in Spain, when I’d be at a wine party or in the courtyard at school and get scolded for the belligerent actions of my government. “Well you’re the one who started the war,” they’d say, or “why the hell did you raise the tax on DVDs?” and I’d recline there thinking to myself, wait, did I do that?

Coming to Colombia via Panama, this was nothing new to me. Consumers of American pop culture outside of the US inevitably think of my country as a celebrity-laden paradise: one where it’s not uncommon to see the likes of Barrack Obama and Cher sharing milkshakes on the street. Foreigners always interpreted my country as insulting when it came to politics, prolific in the arena of sports stars, and industrious in production of everything that was unhealthy and thus utterly delicious. These are, perhaps, similar to the misconceptions that contain Colombia.

The truth is that while Colombia is formally the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, the industry is not one that is out in the open or even necessarily accepted in most regards. Not unlike bullies or bumblebees, it’s an industry that generally won’t bother you unless provoked. If you’re on vacation and trying to score drugs down a back alley, expect the same sketchy circumstances as you would at home. Colombia has this unfortunate reputation among foreigners: rebel-filled jungles, Pablo Escobar, uncivilized civilizations. Most of Colombia’s drug problems are like venomous snakes – harmless unless goaded – in fact, most of this activity takes place in the far reaches of the country where tourists would never stray.

When he was young, my Colombian friend Hermes went on a fishing trip with his father to a secret lake in the jungle, or at least that’s how he describes it. They were experiencing no luck when, from out of nowhere, a jaguar dove out of the brush, into the water, and surfaced with some sort of reptile in its jaws. “It was a tiny tiny crocodile,” Hermes said. “Was the smallest crocodile I ever seen.”

Today’s Colombia culture is a well-preserved tribute to the nation’s past. Very much a melting pot of cultures, Colombian society is wound from the threads of African, Spanish, and indigenous populations for a mix of various skin tones, music beats, flavors and architecture.