Saturday, February 2, 2008

Waiter, there’s a bicu in my tomato!

I know that wherever you are can have a bad day. I've had plenty of days like that in America. (Like the day that I slid off the road on the way to work and had to call a tow truck to get back on the road. Oh, I did this twice in the same morning...)

Anyway, yesterday was one of those days. I learned a long time ago that there is no point going through something unpleasant if you don't laugh about it later. So, I will fill you in on a little part of it.

We have a break this week and I've really been looking forward to it, so of course last week had tons of problems. Nothing major just a lot of minor exasperations, but all of that ended in a loud way yesterday. There is a girl who goes to the market for me and for some reason I have a terrible time getting her to understand exactly what I want. So on Friday I was taking the groceries out of the bag after I got back from class. I was disappointed when I saw that she had bought the wrong kind of beans and I was thinking about how I could have described them any more clearly. While I was distracted by my thoughts I picked up the first tomato something moved on my finger. I dropped the tomato and when I saw the nasty worm that had been touching my finger I literally jumped and screamed. I included a picture for you.


*Note: His head kind of came off when I threw the tomato and that made some of his guts squirt out, so that's what the nasty green stuff is. Also, this is Jason's hand holding the tomato because I didn't really want to go there again.

It really wasn't the end of the world, just the bicu (bee-choo) that broke the camel's back.

Oh yeah, I have another funny story regarding food from last week too. Jason and I eat lunch together with some of the other workers at the Youth Center each day. One day this past week we had fish. The lady who cooks for the group of us usually cuts them in half (not long ways, but where the belt would be if they needed to wear a belt for their fish pants) and fries them. So they have the head, tail, skin, bones, everything except the guts. The fish are about 8 inches long.

Anyway, I picked up a tail piece and a big, round, organ-looking thing about the size of a tootsie roll (except more oval-like) fell out. I looked at one of the guys and said, "What is this?" He said, "It's the egg" so I put it in the pile of bones that we don't eat. He looked confused and asked, "Aren't you going to eat that?" I said, "No, wait, do people eat this???" He said, "Yeah! If you don't want it I'll eat it!" So I gladly handed it over. Actually that day all of the fish were mature females and they all had large ovaries full of eggs and Celestino ate all of them - I think like 5 or 6 total. I was kind of grossed out but I did eat a tiny little bite of one that was broken. I didn't eat the actual outside part, just a few of the eggs. They were really tiny and I think each ovary had like 1000 of them.

The guys were laughing at me and Jason for being weirded out about the fish eggs so Jason asked them if they would eat a cow testicle. They all laughed and said of course. Then they proceeded to tell us how people eat the cow skin and that hooves make really nutritious soup for people who are sick. It made me realize that the food we eat over here is really good compared to the food that we could be eating over here.

On a related note, Jason and I like to try new things so when we saw "Africa Cola" we couldn't resist. Here's Jason trying to drink it.


I think he forgot to take the top off... Actually after this picture we did open it up and take a sip... aaaaaand then we closed it. You see, even though it looks the same as a regular old Coke it kind of tasted like a mix of Coke, Ginger Ale, spiced gum drops, and Lysol. Needless to say, not fantastic.

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