Scary Soup

I like to think I'm a fairly adventurous eater. I've been to college, foreign countries, and many exotic restaurants, and have eaten things that were most likely food...give or take. But today, I ran across something that I just COULD NOT eat.

It all started as an innocent bowl of ramen. I was way too asleep this fine morning to get the whole packing a lunch thing together. So I grabbed a bowl of ramen (from the Asian grocery store...not the cheap stuff, ya know, the stuff that costs upwards of a dollar!) and headed out the door.

Fast forward to lunch. I open up the bowl, and come face to face with three packets. And since this is the authentic, dare I say "fancy" version of ramen, it's completely in Chinese and I have no idea what all the writing on it says, but whatever, this is not my first ramen! I think I know what I'm doing!

The first packet is obviously the sauce. The second, some standard issue dehydrated veggies. But the third was unfamiliar to me. It appeared to be some kind of matted wad of grass. I put it through the ol' smell test, and it registered as fairly neutral. I'm thinking it's some kind of seaweed. Ok, throw it in.

Then I added the hot water. And this is really where the wheels fell off the wagon. Let me tell you how the mystery wad was NOT seaweed. At the first touch of hot water, it immediately transformed into this gelatinous goo the color of intestinal bile. But upon poking it with my chopsticks it had these fiberous looking flecks of darker bile. Blermph.

But I thought, I don't have anything else for lunch, maybe I can stir it in and it will disolve and I can pretend that I never saw that. Denial springs eternal my friends. It staunchly refused to disolve. Instead, it just spread out, its hideous fibers infesting my udon to the point that the noodles looked like they were covered in hair. Call my standards rediculous if you must, but I firmly believe that my lunch should never EVER be in need of a shave.

I couldn't do it. I Couldn't force the hairy soup past my lips.
So I chucked it and went to Burger King.

(author's note: since lunch I have done some research and discovered that the offending substance was most likely Collocalia Esculanta, a species of swallow's nest. Basically a bird had vomited in my soup.)