You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.

Hippier Than Thou

The sun rose late over the last morning of the festival (or at least, we rose late).  By the time we rolled out of our tent, all our friends, all the organic coffee vendors and homeless musicians and naked children and drunken surfers were busily packing all their homes back into their cars.  There was a three-week festival coming up in Shiga prefecture, everyone said, and when we tearfully bid farewell to some of our new best friends, we tempered our loneliness by half-promising to see each other at the next festival.  We knew we wouldn’t, though.  In our hearts, we're bike hippies, not music festival hippies.

The Austrian, despite his earlier decision to stay another week to help clean up, hustled out of there with the first drunken surfer who’d give him a ride to Shiga.  The other WWOOFer had gone, too, and with such a show of affection from the Pasar crowd that I have never seen before.  Shaking, she read a statement that someone had written in phonetic Japanese, then switched to more heartfelt (if no less shaky) English.  She received a fond round of applause and many, many hugs as she went on her way.

For some reason Jenn and I were the only ones to honor the "make a weird face" edict.  Funny how that keeps happening.

By one o’clock, almost everyone was gone.  Ours was the last lonely tent still standing in the campground, the field around us stamped with squares and rectangles all different shades of yellow and brown.  It was time to get back into the Pasar groove: help out a little, play some music, maybe cook something, and just generally take in the sea air.

Though it is hard to really relax when your butt scrapes on the ground.

"Tomorrow, we'll need to you help out again," Natsu told us after Aki had retreated to wherever it is he goes.  "We have a very important seminar, and we need to get the place all cleaned up before the teachers get here."

"Of course!" we agreed, happy to have some work to do (though maybe not that happy).   "What's the seminar about?"

"Whaling."

We threw ourselves into taking down the bamboo bar, clearing bottles, sweeping dirt and dumping it into larger piles of dirt.  We were told that it was important that we stay quiet during the seminar, as the proceedings were top secret unless we paid the fifty bucks each to join in.  Also, there would be food, which we would be allowed to eat if there was any extra.

When the teachers arrived, we helped them carry large styrofoam boxes into the Dragon Room.  "What's in these, anyway?" I asked Natsu.

"Whale!  Now go light the oven, please."

I think we're gonna need a bigger oven.

It was then that it dawned on us that this was a pro-whaling seminar happening at Pasar.  Naturally, as children of the '90s in the US, Jenn and I have been thoroughly educated in the "Save the Whales" dialogue.  Specifically, we've been taught that whaling is bad and that whalers are evil, heartless monsters whose boats are fueled by the tears of crippled puppies.  Being a hippie establishment, we assumed that Pasar would naturally be on the side of some of the more prominent American hippie establishments like Greenpeace (and Captain Kirk).

Once again, we were provided with an opportunity to confront some unexamined biases we've held.  It's not that hard for an American to get behind "Save the Whales," if only because giving up eating whale isn't much of a challenge for the average American.  It's not hard to give something up if you'd never encounter it in the first place.  Though, as we discovered at a museum in Hagi, this hasn't always been the case for Americans: indeed, the US's hunger for whale oil was so insatiable a mere century and a half ago that America was fully willing to invade Japan in order to get to the whales in its waters.  But even back then, when American sailors were bringing in whales by the thousands, they still weren't really a hot commodity on the dinner table.

Japan, meanwhile, has chowed down on whale throughout its history.  Now I'm not one to accept "tradition" as a reason for basically anything, and "tradition" is used as a justification for a bunch of nasty stuff worldwide (especially in Japan), but I tried to keep an open mind as Natsu educated us. Did you know that there's actually a population boom of whales in recent years?  Or that whales are a much more sustainable food source than most livestock?  Neither did I, and I'm not terribly sure I believe either of those things now, either, but Natsu sure stated her case admirably.

Sure, whales may be intelligent and make noises that sound beautiful to human ears, but heck, pigs are at least as cute and intelligent as dogs and that hasn't really sparked a popular "Save the Pigs" campaign.  Though we were not sure about the prospect of eating such an intelligent animal, one that we'd been long taught to regard as gentle and soulful, when the pizzas topped with whale bacon came out of the brick oven, our adventurousness won out and we had a slice or three.  They were tasty as heck, though really, I'd probably eat my own head if it was served on a brick-oven pizza.

The whaling seminar wasn't the only such affair held at Pasar during our short stay there.  During the festival, there was also a lecture given on the dangers of vaccination.

"It's unhealthy to put chemicals into your body," said Natsu between puffs on her American Spirit.  Aki and Shio nodded along and lit their own cigarettes.

This is an interesting point that we keep running into: the farther to the left you go, the more you find people who share opinions with folks on the far, far right.  Pasar is as big a hippie enclave as we've ever found ourselves, a hotbed of permaculture, veganism, pacifism, organic farming...and they're also anti-vax, pro-whaling.  While I understand (and share!) a healthy skepticism when it comes to the medical industry, the controversy about vaccinations seems to be coming from a place of gratuitous anti-intellectualism.  I hadn't expected people as smart as Aki and Natsu to fall for the Naturalistic Fallacy, but there it is.  We did the hippie thing and kept our peace, sealing our lips as they told us about the evils of vaccination.

Another brief illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy at work: one afternoon, Shio went walking down by the ocean with a fishing spear, and in the evening he came back with a delicious-looking octopus.  Natsu butchered it beautifully and we ate it sashimi-style, raw with soy sauce.  Now, I'm all for foraging and fishing (as long as other people do it), but there was an implicit assumption at play here that an octopus swimming around the ocean, by virtue of it being "natural," would be healthful for human beings to eat.  Moreover, that it would be better for the people who ate it than farmed octopi that would probably be full of chemicals of an indeterminate nature.

Don't get me wrong.  The octopus was damned delicious, and I'd eat another one right this minute.  But I also don't know where this particular octopus had been or what it had been eating.  It could have been chock full of octopus flu, for all Shio had known.  I mean, it's an established fact that the ocean is 90% fish poo.  But the prevailing attitude at Pasar is that, because this octopus is natural, it is also better than anything touched by human hands.

Another illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy: because this giant, face-sized, poison-slavering spider is natural, it must be a good thing!  You know, despite all the very obvious evidence to the contrary!

Really, we shouldn't have been surprised; this wasn't our first run-in with Pasar's anti-science stance.  When I came down with a cold after a few days of sleeping in a damp, rained-on tent, I decided to pop a couple of milligrams of Japanese cold medicine.  Over-the-counter medicine in Japan is exceedingly wimpy, but as it's what's available, we have a whole pharmacy stashed in one of our bags.  My one error was to take these pills while sitting in the living room.

"Hey, what is that?" Aki asked me in English as the pill was inches from my open mouth.

"Uh...cold medicine?  I have a cold."

"Don't take that, that's no good."  He shook his head.  I was about to agree, saying that it might not be very potent, but it's all you can buy in this country, but before I could, he told me, "Go ask Natsu for homeopathy."  I tried to keep my eyebrows unraised.

Within minutes, Natsu had retrieved a clear plastic medicine chest filled with pill bottles.  She looked through the dazzling array of colored circles.  "Headache?" she asked, and I nodded.  "Phlegm?"  At last, she presented me with a small pink pill, which she instructed me to hold under my tongue until it dissolved.

"What's...uh, what's in this?"

"Sugar," she said, chipper.  Sure enough, it left a sweet taste in my mouth as it quickly melted into nothing.  I had my doubts; after all, I already take plenty of sugar, mostly administered orally, with chocolate chips.  Yet oddly enough, I did start to feel better before long, and that replaced my cold with crippling existential doubt.  The placebo effect works only if you believe in whatever you're taking, right?  And I have no faith at all in the power of sugar pills, and that very doubt should kill their efficacy, right?

As I've said, I consider myself a bit of a hippie.  I quit my job to bike around the world, I care about the environment, I've belonged to the ACLU and Amnesty International, I believe in art and love and peace, I've experimented with vegetarianism (and absolutely nothing else, Mom).  I don't have a TV.  But holy cow, I am not nearly as big a hippie as I thought I was.  Vaccinated?  Anti-whaling?  Over-the-counter drugs?  If full-time permaculture meditating organic farm hippies look down on those things, then what kinda tourist does that make me?

On our last day before hitting the road, another young, awkward WWOOFer asked Natsu what exactly "hippie" meant.  "Long hair, hemp pants, tie-die, right?"  I rolled my eyes.

"Yes, that's 'hippie style.'  It's all tied up in the '60s, there really aren't any hippies any more," she said, and my eyes stopped rolling and started bugging out.  Surely not!  How could anyone doubt that hippies are alive and well after hosting a week-long music festival on her organic farm?

"Natsu, I always thought that you and Aki were hippies," I protested.

She shook her head.  "We're alternative.  All the hippies are gone."

I kept quiet and reflected on this for the rest of the evening.  I've known many people who've self-identified as hippies, but mostly it's a term that I hear coming out of my own mouth.  Hippiedom in the US is a fairly competitive thing: vegans look down on vegetarians, bike hippies look down on hippies with cars.  I'm sure I brought this competitive spirit with me to Pasar, and whether it's a difference of culture or language, the same definition of "hippie" just doesn't seem to exist in Japan.  I don't feel like I particularly want or need to fit into a subculture that may or may not exist any more, but for some time now I've called myself a hippie with some pride.  Maybe that's just another gift from my Boomer parents.  Even if I'm not a hippie by Japanese standards, even if I'm not enough of a hippie by hippie standards, it's still a label that simplifies my multifarious life into an easy-to-understand cultural archetype.

Regardless of the nomenclature, I know that I've seen some common spirit shared by the hippies/alternatives/whatever whom I've known.  If dancing under the full moon at Pasar isn't hippie, then I still want to be whatever it is.  Whatever our ideological or lifestyle differences with Aki and Natsu and all the others in the Pasar family, we share so, so much.  That will always connect us, and that will bring us back again.

Pasar 3: Showtime

The appointed hour had come.  The accordion was found collecting dust at Pasar had been repaired, the cafe had been set up for business, we'd sent off our documents to apply for our work visa, and most importantly, the flag was finished.

Design by Jenn Thomas of Jenn Thomas from Jenn Thomas/Jenn Thomas, featuring Jenn Thomas

Modelled by Jenn Thomas

Under the full moon, Jenn and I set up our instruments on one of the three empty stages.  We'd spent the day rehearsing and dragging wooden furniture back and forth across the yard, finally determining the arrangement best suited to polite appreciation and/or dancing on tables.  By 7:00, nobody had turned up.  We started on the beers that we'd brought to share with our hosts.  By 7:30, the starting time for our concert, we were still alone and on our second beer.

Eventually, our audience arrived: a dozen or so married women from the neighborhood, bearing snacks and bottles of wine.  Fortunately, that didn't stop them from taking advantage of the Pasar Moon kitchen, which turned out curries and one delicious pizza after another.  Jenn and I took the stage for our first duo concert.  Under the circumstances, our old band's name, Raku 3, seemed inappropriate, so we went by Jenn's stage name, Jenny Dreadful.  It felt good to be performing again; after all, we'd carted our instruments around the previous 1,000 miles, so we might as well get some use out of them.

The show, sadly, was lackluster.  This was our first time performing in nearly a year, and though we'd spent the past few months jamming by the roadside, we weren't quite as polished as we would usually like.  The audience was pretty different from our usual crowd of friends appreciative old drunken bachelors, too, having turned up more to hang out with one another than to see us.  Still, we gave it our best go, and the contributions to our nagezen basket (literally, "thrown money") were generous, except for the person who gave us a wedge of cheese.  Despite the protests of Aki, who was oddly absent from this event except while we were playing, we deposited all of our takings right into Pasar's donation box.  He told us about how Pasar is meant to be a space to support artists and musicians, and that the usual policy was to comp all non-WWOOFing artists their room and board.  The money was ours, he insisted, not the venue's.  When he left to get a cigarette, we dropped the cash into the box; after all, we had just found a job, and places like Pasar need support themselves.

When all of the pizza had been eaten and our donations had been counted, Natsu stood before her friends and patrons to explain the bill situation.  From this year, she said, Pasar would not set any prices for its food or drinks, but would instead rely wholly on Love Donations.  Whatever the customer was moved to pay for what they received, that would be what they should pay.  If ever there is a customer who can't afford a dime, then their meal should be eaten with clear conscience.  "Japanese people are very bad at this because they're so shy," she had told us earlier, "but this is important to our idea of Pasar Moon."  They listened patiently, receptively (despite Aki's doubts) as she spoke, and when she finished, they all contributed heartily to the box.  More beer was opened in celebration, and we retired to our room to pack up our instruments.

As I flipped the lightswitch, I caught a glimpse of something dark and thin scuttle out from behind Jenn's pillow.  My heart sank, as I knew instinctively what it was.  I calmly put down the ukulele, told Jenn to step back, and screamed my little heart out: "Mukade!"

Attention, current or future mortal enemies: if you could just skip ahead to the picture of a ducky, that would be great.  See you there!

Centipedes are my greatest fear in the world, and are my persistent theological proof that we are not living in the best of all possible worlds (additional proofs involve the non-existence of a Spider-man or -men).  On the rare occasions in which I've encountered them, I've turned into a squealing, useless bag of slop (more than usual, even).  Fortunately, in this case, Natsu-san heard my cry and ran to the rescue with a cup of hot water and a set of tongs.  She plucked the foot-long, writhing black nightmare up and dropped it into the water, where it danced about in fury before falling into a very convincing faux-death.  As far as I know, it still lives at Pasar, feigning death and waiting for me to return.  She told me then that there had been several mukade spotted that day, one of them having stung Aki on the leg mere hours before.  Perhaps it had something to do with the full moon, she suggested.  Maybe they just didn't like the show.

We took what was left of our beers into the living room, leaving the party to collect our thoughts.  Jenn rubbed my back and reassured me that that was probably the last centipede anywhere in the whole world, and that there was no chance of another one living under my pillow and waiting until we fell asleep to lay eggs in my eyeballs.  Natsu came to find us before too long, and saw me in a daze.

"Are you in shock?" she asked.  I nodded limply, and explained that I would probably be unable to sleep that night or any other night.  She nodded back solemnly. "OK, let's get drunk.  Do you drink tequila?"  

We spent the next hour or so trading recipes for tequila shots and discussing our lives.  What we spoke of I won't reveal here, suffice to say how stricken I was for the first time at the appropriateness of their names ("Natsu" meaning "summer," "Aki" meaning "autumn"; Natsu is in her thirties, Aki in his fifties).  If there were any other mukade that night, I didn't notice; Natsu's home remedy was extremely effective.