Ridahne might have been considered young among elves, but among humans, she was ancient. One hundred and three years was a long time to be alive for a human. And Ridahne supposed that it was a long time. Though she was young, she'd lived a lot of life in those hundred years. She was experienced, and had the privilege of traveling and living in two completely different social classes--practically two different worlds. This often made her seem a little jaded, like she'd seen what life had to offer and was not always impressed. It was a rare thing indeed for her to learn of something she had not seen before, or knew very little about. But Darin was chock full of them today. She'd heard of snow, but never seen it, and she did not know what apple pie was, not exactly. It felt wondrous to learn of something completely new to her. 

"Apple pie...? I'm familiar with apples...but..not pie. You bake it so...it is a bread?" She indicated a loaf shape with her hands. "I'm picturing raisin bread that we have, like a loaf or sometimes a smaller bun with golden raisins and goat cheese mixed in it, but with apple? Probably not it but I can't think of anything else it'd be similar to." She had to agree though that the sun did have a smell, in a way. Maybe not directly, but it changed the way other things smelled in a distinct way. At home it smelled of dust, and of salt, of earth, but the dry sort, not the wet, black variety found elsewhere. 

Ridahne's eyes lit up a bit. "So you've seen snow? Touched it? I've heard about it, and that it's cold, but I've never seen it before. I've seen paintings, so I sort of know what it looks like, and I've heard that it's often on high mountain peaks, but our mountains are too old and too small to have snow. Merchant ship crewmen at the docks would talk about it sometimes when they went up north. They say that the sea splashes up on the deck and wets the ropes and the sails, and the water changes. It gets hard, like it's not water anymore, like it's glass. You call it ice, yes? But they say snow is not like ice, it is soft and almost like sand but lighter. They say you can jump into a pile of it and it goes POOF!" She illustrated this with her hands and a smile. "I want to know more about snow. What's it like? I heard that children use it to construct effigies of odd, limbless, fat men--is that true? What is this for? Is it a religious ritual? Or a ward against evil spirits?" She asked this with all the dead-serious earnestness of a scholar. Sailors were known to spin tall tales, but she'd heard that one enough times to believe it.

Ridahne had to laugh at 'is that a safe question'. They did have a rocky start, didn't they? But they were getting better. Better at communicating and better at understanding one another. And Ridahne did not feel so ashamed of herself as she once did, and it made it easier to open up. "I also love porridge. We eat it with cinnamon, sometimes raisins, and if you're feeling energetic, you go and get a coconut to shave into it. You probably haven't had a coconut, I don't know that they grow this far north. It's...not a nut, and it's not a fruit. But it's a round thing with a thick shell you need a rock or a blade to break open, and then inside is a sweet, slightly milky water that you drink--very very good in the desert when you're dehydrated. And it has a sorta tough meat that's pure white and sweet. You can dry it and shave it into flakes or grind it into almost a flour, but usually the other kids and I would make contests of climbing the trees--they don't have branches like pines, you see, so it's very hard--and we'd break open the shell with a rock and just scrape off the meat with our teeth. We make a sort of milk out of it by pounding down the meat with some water and filtering it. It's very creamy and kind of sweet."

She thought a moment. "My favorite thing to eat though...well, okay, two things. One is the most decadent thing I've ever had, and one is what makes me feel at home. That one is definitely curry--the reddish orange kind--with rice, coconut milk, golden raisins, potato, some herbs, and goat meat. If it's really a special occasion, you add some crushed almonds. Ikali--my mother--used to make it as often as she could, which wasn't much. But that tastes like home. The other one though is chocolate. They grow the plant it comes from in Orosi and in southern Siren lands. It is sweet and bitter but in a nice way like coffee, and it melts in your mouth...and on your fingers, which is why it rarely makes its way to Azurei where it's so hot. Have you had it?"