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>Bring 'em on, big boy! I'm un-grossable!
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once upon a time i was sitting in a roadside eatinghouse in Hue in Vietnam eating a beef noodle soup and chatting to some friends. The cook brought out a bowl of boiled eggs and put them in front of us. I carried on chatting and eating my soup and absent mindedly picked up a boiled egg and started peeling it. When the top came off i discovered that a delicacy in Vietnam is to boil the egg just a few days before it was going to hatch... and there was the chick/embryo with eyes and beak and wings looking up at me.


another time i was staying in a yurt with some Kazakh nomads in some mountains in the west of China. After about a week of eating stale bread and horses milk mine host slaughtered a sheep. So i watched him kill it and hang it up in the doorway of the yurt as it bled to death and thought, oh well, at least there'll be a barbecue tonight. Well, eventually we all sat around the fire and i was presented with a bowl of boiled sheep's innards ; stomach, gizzard, rubbery stuff with lumps on, kidneys, liver, lung, intestine.. etc etc. I ate as much as i could (there was nowt else) and politely handed my bowl back. I got the leftovers back for breakfast next morning.


around the same time i was in Kashgar again in the far west of China just over the border from Pakistan. The people there are Uighar, akin to the turks, and eat bagels. Terific bagels. But i kept seeing people take a bagel and break it into small pieces into a bowl of hot green tea and eat it with chopsticks. Can't imagine that would be very good i thought but i kept seeing people do it. Then one day i was at a market and hungry and sat down in a tent for some tea and a bagel and thought i'd give it a try. So i asked for a big bowl of tea and a bagel and sat down and started tearing the bagel into small pieces and dropped it into the tea. All the while everyone else in the tent just stared at me, bewildered. Bit i carried on and got the chopstiks and started eating and it was awful... just like bits of bread soaked in hot green tea. Then it dawned on me.... the only people doing that were old and had no teeth and couldn't chew their bagel.


Then there's Tibet... rancid yak butter tea anyone? How about ground roasted barley mixed into a paste with rancid yak butter?


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