http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=236x63291Oh my.
The sparkling husband primitive.
Stinky The Clown (1000+ posts) Mon Apr-13-09 11:13 PM
Original message
When traveling or eating in a new place, neither experiment too much nor not at all
If you do, you may end up sick in bed or ignorant.
I'd rather risk the illness than the ignorance.
Too late for the sparkling husband primitive, though.
The Rita Hayworth primitive:
Tangerine LaBamba (1000+ posts) Mon Apr-13-09 11:26 PM
Response to Original message
1. Sometimes you don't have the choice -
I was warned, the first time I went to Peru, very specifically - don't drink the water and don't eat anything you can't peel. I was young, but I wasn't stupid. I followed the instructions carefully, and that meant I ended up eating beautifully barbecued chunks of marinated beef that I thought were some kind of sirloin, but turned out to be cow hearts, anticuchos, and it was fabulous. I learned about marinated fish, loving the escabeche de corbina that was served so elegantly in the small dining room of the Hotel Simon Bolivar. I eschewed salads, but discovered chirimoya and palta and choclo.
I drank beer, because it was good and because you didn't need ice - it was chilled. And I even drank from the bottle when I could, not trusting that the glasses might not have been properly dried.
That's how careful I was.
I had been warned that because the viaduct system in Lima pre-dated Christ, there were microbes in the water supply that defied description, but there was a particular kind of dysentery that struck people sixty-seven days after they arrived in Peru. Sixty-seven days.
I laughed.
On my sixty-eighth day there, it hit. It still remains the singularly most disgusting illness I've ever had, the most shocking because it hit in a matter of feeling fine at 7 pm and being on my way to the clinico at 8 pm. To this day, I have no idea how long I was there or how long I was sick.
So, yeah, it's fun to explore the foods, and, what the hell - no matter how careful you are, something will get you. So you might as well go for it.
And I still fix a really great anticucho when I get a hankering for it ................
Speaking as someone who's done quite a bit of traveling--although nowhere recently--one can avoid such problems simply by, if one doesn't know what something is, one doesn't eat it.
