Lost in Translation - It is a Nut

We keep seeing these giant nuts on the ground and can't figure out where exactly they're coming from.

The nuts are obviously from one of the tall trees around here, but we haven't actually seen any of the nuts in a tree. They're almost as big as my hand, very hard and pretty light in weight. We've been wondering what they are called. The kids pick them up and bang them around. They sound rather hollow. They try to crack one open occasionally - they can't. If anyone walks by us at the time, they tell us they're a coconut.

Um, what? A coconut? This doesn't look anything like the coconuts we know. Where's all the hair? And it doesn't seem to have any liquid inside it sloshing around. I've seen immature coconuts and these don't seem similar. These nuts we're seeing have a different shape than any coconut I've seen. But what do we really know about coconuts? So we haven't questioned anyone passing who told us it was a coconut.

But this nut has really been bugging me. We've been seeing them for months and we don't have a solid name for them. As we've been learning more about Singapore's local plants, it finally dawned on me that maybe people weren't saying coconut. Maybe... they were saying... cocoa nut,...

... as in a nut from the cocoa tree.

Sure enough, our nuts look like the nut of a Cocoa Tree - A Cocoa Nut. I told the girls that this is where chocolate comes from.

So there you go folks, chocolate does grow on trees and falls from the sky in Singapore.