Strange Foods and Unfamiliar Places

Every once in a while, I see these “quizzes” in social media asking you how many of the list of various foods you do/do not eat. I don’t generally respond because I’ve eaten just about everything on the list – and generally enjoyed it. I’ve said on many occasions that when I encounter a new food, my response is “try it, then ask what it was” as if you know beforehand what it is you may have a reaction to the name of it rather than to the food itself. I will sometimes have to take a slight delay before eating it – just because I want to watch someone else eat it first to know if I’m eating it properly. And I’ve only refused something once – as I’ll explain at the end of this blog.

Here, in no particular order, are a list of some of the less usual foods that I’ve had the opportunity to eat. I’ve limited myself to no more than one food per country/city, partly because I don’t always remember what it was I ate for every meal and there are so many good foods in every country I’ve been to. Note that there are restaurants in the US which serve these types of foods, but having them in their country of origin is the best!

 

Peking Duck (Beijing, China) – Peking is the original name of the city of Beijing, so it’s only natural that this is the best place to find that specialty. The more famous restaurants which serve it are known by nicknames: Big Duck, Little Duck, and Sick Duck (a strange name for a restaurant, but so known because it’s across the street from a large hospital). There are multiple cooks involved in the preparation – some specialize in the cooking, and others in the carving process. Each of the pieces has skin, fat, and meat – not at all like the US tradition of slicing a chicken/turkey. Yumm!

Tortillas with Fried Bull’s Blood (Mexico City) – While in Mexico City on business we went out one day to a really nice restaurant and this was on the menu. I was feeling adventurous (as is often the case), and decided to try it. It’s just what it sounds like. They pour bull’s blood from a pitcher onto a hot grill and stir it around until it turns a brownish-red color and begins to coagulate. You get a dish of it along with tortillas. You put a tortilla on your plate, add a spoonful or two of the fried blood, roll it up, then eat it. I liked it so much I had a second one. Doesn’t this sound appealing?

Raw Fish (Sushi) (Tokyo) – Before visiting Japan, I wasn’t sure about the idea of eating raw fish. But when I was there for a few days with one of my Japanese contacts, Ishida-san, and he took me to a little restaurant where they served it, I figured, “why not?” We were at the bar with the chef right in front of us. He would make a few of one kind of fish, lay it on top of a hand-formed bit of rice, then put it on the counter. I lost count of the number of different types of fish we had that meal – but all raw (of course) and all delicious.

Slime Balls (Venezuela) – I’m not sure what the correct botanical name for this fruit is. They look like a hard-covered fruit, larger than a grape but smaller than a golf ball. You crack the hard-covering off, then pop the whitish, slimy-looking, fruit in your mouth. You can only suck them as there is a large, hard pit in the center. Not the greatest to look at, but in a hot climate the moisture is appreciated.

Fufu (Ghana) – This is a soft, doughy staple food made of boiled cassava mixed with plantains. Most foods in Ghana are not eaten with utensils. You take a small handful off the big ball on your plate, shape it appropriately (using the right hand only) and dip it in the soup/stew – often a peanut butter soup, trying to keep your hands relatively dry. After the meal you wash your right hand using a bowl of water and soap on the table. When I began my stay in Ghana the first few days I would have a very discolored hand from the soup, but by the end of the week, I would only have staining on the ends of a couple of fingers. You can read more about my Ghanaian eating experiences here.

Brazilian Barbeque (Sao Paulo, Brazil) – Unlike the US version of barbeque, the Brazilian version is a restaurant where there are a wide variety of meats. Each is cooked on a skewer and the waiters walk around with them. You select the waiter with the meat you want and he cuts off large slices/hunks onto your plate. There is a large “coin” by your plate with a red and green side and you put the red side up when you don’t want service and the green side up when you do. I lost track of the number of different kinds of meats that had! See here for more info.

Korean Barbeque (Seoul, South Korea) – Korean barbeque is also not at all like the US. All the meats are thinly sliced and available at a self-serve station. Each table has a grill in the center. You take a serving of the kind of meat you want and cook it yourself. Being very thinly sliced, it cooks very quickly. See here for more info.

Mongolian Stir Fry (Beijing, China) – Sometimes it’s not the food itself, but the restaurant experience that is rememberable. I went to a Mongolian Stir Fry restaurant near Beijing. You take a large bowl past a self-serve area that is stocked with various meats and vegetables (all uncooked). When you have what you think you’ll eat, you hand the bowl to one of the cooks who is working at a VERY hot round flat-top grill (about 5’ in diameter). He pours the contents of your dish onto the grill, and, using a pair of long wooden sticks, tosses everything around so it all gets properly cooked. When it’s done (in a very short amount of time), he takes the sticks in one hand and a clean bowl in the other, sends all the food flying in the air with a swish of the sticks, and collects the whole thing into the bowl as he moves it under the airborne food. You then take the bowl to your table and eat. Fun to watch – what talent those cooks have!

Szechuan steak (Shanghai, China) – When in Shanghai with two others, one from the US and one from Korea, we were sightseeing on our free day and it was getting to be dinner time so, since I had been in Shanghai before, I was tasked with finding a restaurant. Looking around, I saw one that looked promising on the 4^th floor of a nearby building. We took the elevator up. They had trouble locating an English menu, but we were seated. I chose a beef dish which had three peppers next to it (meaning it would be pretty spicy) and the other two chose the mildest dish they could find. When my meal was delivered, I saw why it was marked the way that it was. There were so many crushed red pepper flakes that I had to move some aside to find the meat underneath. It was definitely hot, but I knew it wouldn’t last long afterwards, so I really enjoyed it through the tears flowing down my cheeks. Afterwards, my companions informed me that I was no longer allowed to choose the restaurant on the remainder of our trip together!

Seafood Pizza (Bangkok, Thailand) – There are many, many, good foods in Thailand. But one I’d like to mention was one I had on my last trip there in 2012. I was there a day early and thought I’d wander through the small mall that was attached to the hotel. Passing a Pizza Hut, I noticed that they had displays of their food in the window and one particularly intrigued me – seafood pizza. Since that is not something that we have in the US, I thought I’d try it as I particularly like to have seafood in different parts of the world because it is often locally available fish which varies from one part of the world to another. The only thing about this dish that most folks in the US would recognize as “pizza” was that it was on a base of a circle of bread. But there was no tomato paste, no cheese, no pepperoni or sausage, etc. There were small shrimp, clams, and large chunks of some sort of fish, all smothered in a spicy, rich brown fish sauce. It was delicious!

Chilli Crab (Singapore) [Note that this is the proper spelling in Singapore!] – This is a very popular dish in Singapore. Mud crabs are stir-fried in a semi-thick, sweet and savory tomato-and-chilli-base sauce. It is traditionally eaten with bare hands (lick your fingers afterwards!). As the name suggests, it is fairly spicy, but it’s good! (More about it here).

Fresh from the tank (Jakarta, Indonesia) – While visiting our company subsidiary in Indonesia, I was taken out to lunch at a seafood restaurant. What was different about this one was that all the sea creatures were still alive and swimming in tanks around the outside of a room. You would wander around the room with a waiter following and just point to the ones you wanted to eat (“I’ll take that yellow one, I’ll have one of those, etc.”). They would take a net; catch the ones you pointed to and take them back to the kitchen area to be prepared and cooked. Fifteen minutes later, the ones you pointed out would be on a plate in front of you. I have no idea what kind of fish or other sea creatures they were, but I certainly couldn’t complain about the freshness. Fish is often one of my go-to choices in other parts of the world as there are so many different varieties available.

Regional foods (US)

Scrapple – For those not from SE Pennsylvania, scrapple is a mush of pork scraps and trimmings (the leftovers) together with a binder like corn meal. It is then formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf and slices of it are pan-fried before serving. As long as it is decently prepared and fried enough (i.e., so it’s no longer mushy), I like it with maple syrup for breakfast or with ketchup and fried eggs. It’s definitely an acquired taste.

Catfish, Hush Puppies, Grits, etc. – I’ve been on enough business trips to the SE US that I’ve gotten to like their “cuisine”.  Things like fried catfish, hush puppies, grits, okra, etc. are all part of this fare.

Frog Legs – In college the house manager of our off-campus dorm was always trying to be as economical as possible. When visiting the local food outlet one week she found that someone else had ordered a full case of Indian frog legs by mistake and didn’t want them so the outlet had a greatly reduced price on them. She snapped them up and made them the main dish for dinner that night. Many of the students, especially the girls, turned up their noses at them, but I enjoyed them. That also meant that there were lots of leftovers the following couple of nights and the cafeteria policy was that you could have as many leftovers as you wanted. So, I feasted on frog legs for several nights. Tastes just like chicken!

Ostrich Burger – While in Denver for a conference we had our lunch hour free to buy food at any of the many restaurants in the area. One served burgers – but not your standard beef – they had burgers made from Bison, Ostrich, Alligator, and other exotic animals. I only had one day there, so I chose the Ostrich burger. Tastes pretty similar to beef.

My Only Refusal

Fish Eyeball (Hong Kong) – There was only one time that I declined a new food. I was in Hong Kong and we were at a restaurant on the north side of the island right next to a fishing dock. You ordered and the cook went down on the dock, bought the fish directly from the fisherman, then cooked and served it. The plant manager ordered for the half-dozen people in our party and the main dish was a whole fish (just descale and clean it and throw it on the grill). It is delivered to your table whole, i.e., with the head and tail still on (the proper way to eat it is to NOT flip it over, you take the meat from the topside, then if you want more, you lift the tail and scrape off of the other side, but do not flip it over!) The key delicacy is the eyeball – which is staring up at you (the other eyeball which is on the down side of the fish was against the grill and is not edible). I was perfectly willing to try it, but most of the time I watch someone else so I know “how” to eat it. Since there was only one, if I accepted the offer I would not be able to watch anyone else. Eating with chopsticks (which I’m very comfortable with), I could just see myself trying to lever the eyeball out of the eye socket and sending it flying across the room! So I declined out of concern for embarrassment, not out of not wanting to try eating it.

 

 

Connecting Lives, Sharing Cultures

In 2007 I took early retirement and left behind the 40-hour work week. One of the things that I did to help occupy my time that first year was to spend additional time working with an exchange student organization, AFS Intercultural Programs. I had been acquainted with AFS (then called American Field Service) since 1966 when my parents hosted the first AFS student in our town. I was headed off to college, so Ingrid, my AFS sister from Norway, occupied my room while I was away. Then in 1996, when our daughter was a junior in high school and was interested in international business, we thought a year abroad would be a good experience for her and so she was an AFS exchange student to Norway. A few years later, we were informed that AFS was looking for host families and signed up – over the next several years hosting students from several countries. I also began volunteering for AFS which is how in 2007 I heard that there was an opportunity to participate in a volunteer activity to help write a country-specific host family handbook. This would supplement the existing host family handbook and contain information relative to the culture of a single country. I excitedly signed up (with the agreement of my wife, of course), and was accepted as a member of the team.

 

Germany

The team was going to be focusing on exchanges between the US and Germany. There were a total of 14 team members – 7 from each country, one being a staff member from that country and the rest being volunteers. We had about a year to put this handbook together – the US handbook would eventually number about 60 pages. Both teams would meet together for a week in Germany to exchange cultural information (we each had pre-work to do in the form of presentations on specific aspects of our respective cultures – concentrating on the issues likely to arise in host family – student interactions). We would then have “homework” assignments where individuals or small groups would work on specific aspects. Each team would then work in small teams to construct a draft of the handbook for host families in our respective countries. Then the entire team would meet in the US for several days to review/critique each other’s work before the pair of complementary handbooks would be published. (Note – in all the below, when I refer to the “German handbook”, I’m referring to the handbook that was written to help U.S. Host Families understand the cultural issues of German Participants. There is a corresponding handbook, written in that native language to help host families in that country understand participants from the U.S.) All work in-between would be via email exchanges. Let me quote from the preface of the handbook:

“This handbook represents the culmination of the work of fourteen AFS Volunteers and Staff – seven from the U.S.A. and seven from Germany, dubbed the Transatlantic Orientation Exchange. These group members were selected based on their level of experience in both cultures as well as their proficiency in such areas as training and curriculum design. Their work began in their respective countries the winter of 2007 as they further defined the scope of the project and conducted research on the German and U.S. cultures. This process included a survey of families from the previous three years who had wither hosted a German or U.S. American participant. Over 1000 survey responses were received resulting in a rich pool of data that informed the work of both groups leading up to their first international meeting which took place in Bad Hersfeld, Germany in the fall of 2007.

“During the meeting in Bad Hersfeld the volunteers and staff underwent a journey of intercultural discovery similar to that of the AFS experience. Through information sharing, self-reflection, and experiential activities, they gained valuable insight about their own and “the other” culture, lending the project even more intrigue to the individuals involved as they struggled at times to understand their colleagues from overseas.

“The second international meeting took place in the spring of 2008 in Chicago, Illinois. This time group members reviewed the materials and activities produced since the last meeting and developed plans to distribute and provide training around them in their respective countries. Each group will meet in the fall of 2008 in their home countries to complete an evaluation of the project and develop recommendations on how to implement it with other AFS Partners.”

That first meeting in Bad Hersfeld was unique in a couple of different ways. As the first of its kind, we had to figure out not only how to relate as groups of volunteers from different cultural backgrounds, but how to go about the task before us. We also were concerned that we needed to make this a reproducible activity – so we needed to document the process and the structure of the handbook in ways that future groups of volunteers could benefit from our learnings. Between process, structure, and content, it was challenging to keep the cultural aspects of what we were doing at the forefront of our days. As you can see from the below picture, I was one of only two male members in our combined teams – the other being a college student from Germany who was a recent returnee of the program.

[Germany Team]

 

Bad Hersfeld is a small town pretty much in the center of Germany – equidistant from Hamburg in the north and Munich in the south. It also had good train access from all parts of the country, including being just a two-hour train ride from Frankfort where the US team landed. It was a good place to experience the culture that the US team was tasked with writing about. While most of our days were spent in meetings on the various aspects of culture, we did have time to walk about the town as well as we had one “free” day where we all took a train ride to Eisenach, just to the east and in the former East Germany. Eisenach is home not only of the birthplace of Bach, but of the castle at Wartburg where Martin Luther wrote his German translation of the Bible in the 1500s.

As mentioned above, we were working on a complementary pair of handbooks. The USA team was writing a handbook for US families who were hosting a student from Germany, and the German team was writing a handbook for German families who were hosting a student from the USA. So, we needed to both think through what things families in our respective countries would need to be educated in, but we were simultaneously the “experts” in our own culture for the other team.

Over the winter, we each worked on the section of the handbook which we had assigned to us. At our second face-to-face meeting in Chicago, we got to see everything put together and could review each other’s work. And the USA team got to repay our German counterparts by being the host for their time in this country. The first version of our handbook was made available to host families that summer and, after a few tweaks, a revised version was published in June 2009.

That fall, the USA team met for a last time – at a “cabin” owned by one of the team members on a small pond in Cabot, a town in northern Vermont. Spending a weekend in a cabin with six ladies from across the US was an interesting cultural experience on its own – I had to be on my best behavior! As mentioned above, not only did we make some final tweaks to the handbook based on our reflections over the summer, but we focused on ensuring that our entire process was reproducible so that we could develop similar country-specific handbooks for other countries.

We also made two other decisions that would have impact on the future projects. The first was that in addition to a defined process and structure, it would be helpful to have an individual lead the project who was familiar with the process and structure, i.e., one of us. As you will see below, we followed this advice. The second was that we needed to have some organization to sponsor the work. The initial USA-Germany project was paid for by a grant that AFS-Germany had gotten of money that was still left from the Marshall Plan – the US funds that were given to Germany in the aftermath of WWII to help rebuild their economy. The AFS-USA office would be key in locating a source of funds.

 

Austria

Because the culture of Germany and Austria are so similar, I offered to undertake the task of retrofitting the handbook we had developed to meet the needs of USA families hosting students from Austria. This involved not just changing the word “Germany” to “Austria”, but removing the background information about the project and any German-specific cultural issues. I worked with the AFS-USA staff as well as with an individual in the AFS-Austria office to ensure that the results were culturally correct from an Austrian perspective. This second handbook was published in 2009 just as was the final version of the German handbook. While the German handbook was about 60 pages, the Austrian one was only 45 pages due to the removed materials.

 

Thailand

In 2009, the AFS-USA office procured funding for future projects from the Kennedy-Lugar YES (Youth Exchange and Study) office at the US State Department. This would only fund handbooks relating to countries to which the YES scholarships were awarded. This also meant that the resultant handbooks were in the public domain and could be used by other exchange organizations that handled students from those countries.

For the first YES country, we chose Thailand – the YES country that sends the most students to US each year. I agreed to be the team lead for this team. Many on the team chose to take an opportunity to go to Thailand in advance of our meetings and to spend some time visiting other places than Bangkok. I went early as well, but spent those days in the home of a girl, Noon, and her family. My wife and I had hosted her a few years earlier and I had visited her in Thailand previously as well.

As the first of the YES-sponsored handbooks, we needed to eliminate any AFS-specific information and replace it with corresponding information from the YES program as it would be used by other exchange agencies as well. But we found that the structure that we had established for the German handbook worked very well and we only needed a few tweaks. The resultant handbook, like the German one, was about 60 pages.

Since the AFS-Thailand office is also in Bangkok, we were able to visit it and see how their operation differed from that in the USA. I was also able to participate in the “selection camp” where AFS-Thailand interviews students who have applied and selects who gets to participate (at the time they had 14,000 applicants for 700 available slots, so the competition is pretty intense). Thailand’s culture is much more different from that in the USA than the difference between the USA and Germany. So, the task of identifying the key differences that we needed to educate our USA host families on was fairly daunting. But the resultant handbook which the team delivered later that year worked very well and also set the stage for other YES-sponsored handbooks.

[Thailand Handbook Cover]

 

I also had the opportunity a few years later, when I was serving on the AFS-USA Board of Directors, to return to Thailand for one last time and to spend an evening with the AFS-Thailand members of our group. Making friends in other countries is always so delightful! I’ve written about my experiences in Thailand before here, including more about the selection camp mentioned above. I recommend reading that additional information.

 

Ghana

While all the above was going on, we learned that there was an AFS-USA volunteer, Kathleen, who was interested in producing a handbook for US families hosting students from Ghana. Kathleen was a public health nurse and during her career had lived in Ghana for several months giving technical assistance to the CDC-WHO STOP (Stop Transmission of Polio) project. So, she had a real heart for the country and had already gathered much material that could be used for a host family handbook. But she needed help in organizing it and a structure for presenting it. While she was in California and I was in Pennsylvania, I agreed to work with her to take her raw material and convert it to a suitable handbook that could be part of our growing library of host family handbooks.

For several months, we had an active email interchange as I supplied the structure and additional material to supplement what she had already gathered. We also got the AFS-USA office involved as well as a staff person from the AFS-Ghana office to validate our work (that’s another interesting cultural aspect of preparing these handbooks – understanding the cultural workings of adults in the other country and how to elicit appropriate responses to our questions).

So, even though Kathleen and I never had a face-to-face meeting, nor did we visit Ghana during the project, the resultant handbook was equally as useful and demonstrated the robustness of the structure and process that we had defined for the original German handbook.

[Ghana Handbook]

 

Other Countries

Over the next few years, using the structure and process defined by the team working on the original German handbook, initially following the advice of having each new team chaired by someone from a prior team (toward the end the process was well-enough defined that we dropped this requirement), and going to other countries where YES scholarships were offered (and thus having funding available), there were seven additional handbooks written:

·       Egypt – including Mary Ann from the Germany team

·       Turkey – including Lynn from the Germany team and Kathleen from the Ghana team

·       India – editorial assistance by myself

·       Indonesia

·       Malaysia

·       Pakistan – including Holly from the Thailand team

·       South Africa

 

Final Thoughts

All of the above handbooks are located here on the AFS-USA website. I’m proud to have been able to participate in the development of so many of them. I’ve not only made friends from around the world and around the USA, but I’ve learned a lot myself about the cultures from these various countries.

The last of these eleven handbooks was published around 2013 when we had covered the major countries where there are YES scholarships available. It would be nice if more handbooks for other countries could also be developed using this same format, but getting funding and finding volunteers to take on these projects is not easy.

Understanding other cultures is a skill that can have many uses. Even within the US, we have moved beyond the “melting pot” of earlier generations and so we have “culture clashes” within the country as well as between ourselves and cultures from other countries. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to develop cross-cultural awareness through my many visits and interactions with individuals from around the world – not just in the examples mentioned above. I wish that more people could have these kinds of experiences – either by visiting other countries (and not just as a tourist!), or by having individuals from other cultures stay in your home.

While the entire exchange industry has been impacted by the COVID pandemic, there are still many students coming to the US for the coming year who are waiting to be placed with host families. If this is something that interests you, you can learn about available students on the AFS-USA website here.