On Monday (yeah, I'm behind. Deal), I was invited to lunch on a Taiwanese ship. It was a rather formal affair - shoes taken off in the hallway, sitting at white upholstered armchairs (how do they stay white on a container ship, I wonder?), food served by obliging crew members. The last bit is particularly important, as it means that I had no say in the food that was put in front of me.
Which was...unusual to say the least. There were some rather unappetizing, shriveled little fish, some wilted baby bok choy (which tasted like soap), some spicy tofu and ground beef, and some soup. The soup, which appeared to consist primarily of cabbage and broth, was the only thing I really felt safe eating without making appalling faces of disgust and thus offending my hosts. So I dutifully worked my way through the layers of cabbage, while intermittently pretending to eat the rest of my food and taking refuge in that old childhood standby of messily pushing things around on my plate. It was a good strategy...until I removed the last piece of cabbage from the broth and found myself looking not, as I had expected, at the bottom of the soup bowl, but at something I had never seen at the lunch table before.
It was a testicle.
A pig testicle, to be specific. There it was, all round and pink and plump, just staring up at me. And I was duly traumatized. Revise that: I am duly traumatized. Rudeness be damned, there was no way in hell that pork genital was entering my digestive tract. I will have to rely on hearsay to know what they actually taste like.
And that is the latest installment in the saga of what my life is like aboard ships in Port Newark. I keep myself entertained.
How do you know it was porcine? And maybe the pig was a "eunuch for the kingdom of heaven" and was happy to have given it up.
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