Imma eat a goat nao.
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Or actually I already did that. Eat a goat. Not a whole one of course, but some pretty strange stuff from one I have to say.
This evening I went with Joni to IKEA for reasons I will tell you about hopefully tomorrow. But after that, we went to have dinner with another friend of Jonis at a famous restaurant.
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Outside it looks like this. To the untrained eye looks like an messy and unprofessional restaurant. To the locals and enlightened ones, it is an old restaurant that is still in business. The latter part equals great quality, and people don't really care too much about fancy looks when it comes to restaurants around here so you can expect to be asked to wait in a queue for a very long time before you can get a seat. It's not overly cheap either!
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They cut and sort the meat just outside of the restaurant for everyone to see how it's done and more importantly: the quality of the meat. So you can spot stuff like this. The box below is storing the urinal tracts from the goat. The Taiwanese loves eating wacky stuff like that.
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When you walk in, there's also the menu on display right here. The only stuff that peeps don't eat from an animal around these parts is the hair and bones (and eventually other inedible stuff). If they can manage to swallow it without dying from it, they'll eat it for sure. You can try to find out the different types of organs on the table yourself if you click the picture to get a bigger version.
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There's the guy who's getting the creature ready for display on the above table.
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Now, I'm going to eat this. I never ate goat before. Also, like many of the organs I eat from various animals around here, I've never tried to eat this kind of organ (or body part?) before. Can you guess what it is?
Put the correct answer in the comments and you might get something nice from me if I decide I can afford to send it to your country from here. Or maybe a favor or electronic present. (Anyone desperate for a Google Wave invite? ;p)
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Now, the way you eat this stuff is the same fashion as hot pot. You get this big bowl that already has a lot of nasty stuff in it like heavily cooked goatskin and a lot of seasonings as well as some of the ingredients in "four hot things" (its a google translation from a chinese medicine soup that has no english name) - one of the dishes here that can easily beat my usually very good appetite. The soup here was okay though. But probably not the first thing you should go and eat if you're just visiting for a few weeks.
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To the left is Joni. To the right is her friend who gave us the dinner. She insisted on paying for everything even though it was rather expensive.
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Apparently I didn't take a lot of pictures of the food, so this is the last one you get: A hoof. And yup, I defeated that one afterward as well. It's amazing how you can eat almost anything by just cooking it long enough. I tried the skin before it was cooked more than a few minutes, so now I know this at least: If I get attacked by an angry goat some day, I won't be counting on my teeth as a weapon of any sort.
So yeah. That's it. I ate little other strange looking stuff but actually it was not so terrible. I think the other stuff might very well have been just the normal strangely-cut yet more normal meat.
Now I'm going to bed so my body can get a chance to fight back on my cold. (I 'forgot' my key to the house and my umbrella while it was raining the other day.)