Saturday, September 20, 2008

Raising tolerances

Along with my tolerance for alcohol, my tolerance for eating dirty food is rising. I can feel. I won't quite yet pick up food off the ground and eat it, but I'm at the point where I don't look at my plate or my bowl anymore when I get food to check to see if they're still dirty.

After eating food from at least 100 cart vendors in Thailand and in Korea, I'm starting to just get used to uncleanliness in my everyday life. You can trust me that the carts in Thailand don't look very hygienic, especially when you see things like fruit on top of the cart that has flies all over it, but they don't bother slapping them away because there's hundreds, and they'll just come back anyway. You would have to have a slapping machine to actually control them the way you wanted to, because your arm would snap before the flies went away.

Sometimes I ordered soup from them and they just open the top of this HUGE pot in the middle of the cart, scoop out some goodness and put it in a bowl for you. Who knows if they ever clean that pot or what. If you had to drag a 100kg cart to/from your house using your motorcycle every single day to the street would YOU make sure it's perfectly clean?

Part of this foolery comes from the fact that I have an iron stomach. It's one of my few physical gifts that I was blessed with (along with good teeth, no hair on my skin, and don't need deodorant. There's probably more but I'm not really into listing everything good about myself (I know some people who would have fun making fun of that last statement)). I haven't yet gotten sick on my travels. There have been times when my stomach felt a bit funny, but nothing happened that I noticed.

If I go out to eat with people, and they get sick, it's possible that I might get sick as well, but not guaranteed. I might feel a little something move in my belly but that's about it most of the time. If we go out to eat and I get sick, that means that other people are dying on their bathroom floors. If I'm dying on the bathroom floor, that means that my friends are at the hospital.

I've only had the lastly-mentioned feeling once, and that was in El Paso/Phoenix in 2004 on my road trip from Boston to LA. I had decided to cross the border to Juarez and check out the local food there. That was a mistake. I'm very glad that I was alone, because if someone else was there we would have had to go to the emergency room.

So to sum things up nicely, possibly by the time I'm in Peru I'll be dumpster diving for lunch? haha

6 Comments:

Blogger vovo said...

foolishry?

have you been in asia so long that you can't pronounce the letter 'l' anymore?

September 20, 2008 at 3:34 AM  
Blogger Jimmy said...

foolishry is the word I meant to use here, haha. I'm trying to turn an adjective into a noun. I don't know if it's necessarily correct, but it wasn't a mistake from foolishly

September 20, 2008 at 3:39 AM  
Blogger vovo said...

uhhh...then the word you meant to use was 'foolery'.

you're welcome.

September 20, 2008 at 3:49 AM  
Blogger Jimmy said...

well thank you your highness. how generous of you to spend your valuable time giving me diction advice. i appreciate the time you spent out of your busy day to help a fool out

September 20, 2008 at 4:05 AM  
Blogger Jimmy said...

oh my god! you're like the thai king!

September 20, 2008 at 4:07 AM  
Blogger Brute Force said...

I think you're definitely ready to take on all of the C Grade restaurants in Cali. I can barely bring myself to eat at a B place, let alone a C place. But, maybe all I need is to undergo the same training you've been through.

September 22, 2008 at 2:04 AM  

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