Get in my belly!... please?

The night started out innocently enough: Lab mates decided to go to a national hot pot chain. We've been a few times and it is de-lish. You make your own dipping sauce (my specialty is a sesame peanut sauce with a health dose of garlic) and then they bring out lots of raw meats and fresh veggies that you then cook in spiced broths and eat, family-style.

pretty raw meats!

they even have in-your-face noodle making!

I usually stick to the beef muscle (you wonder why I have to specify "muscle"?) strips and pâté along with potatoes, mushrooms, noodles, etc.

water lilies are edible! surprise!

Somebody usually orders cow stomach (see?) and coagulated duck blood slices, and I will nibble on something of it partly to be courteous and partly to provide my Chinese friends with look-at-the-foreigner-gagging-on-food-we-think-is-totally-normal entertainment.

Well this night, I decided to embrace the culture. Afterall, I've been here three months (!).

Down went the coagulated blood.

I slurped up the prickly stomach.

Up next was new.... duck colon?? Well, "when in Rome..."

I just... really hope they clean these things well.

But then came the crowning event of the night....

no caption can do this justice.

oh yes. brains. pig brains. Now, I'm sure I've eaten brains in things before (let's start--and stop--at sausages), but never a mouthful of pulsating, spongy brain. After it sat in the boiling broth for ~10 min to kill any parasites (wait... can that denature prions too?..) they pulled the ladle out and I ripped a chunk off with my chopsticks.

open the grub gate!

Sadly, it took me a few seconds to gather myself. When I gingerly popped it into my mouth, I chewed a few times and it wasn't as chewy as I thought... I guess the other times I've played with brain was in physiology when it was fixed with PFA. But actually the feathery texture just made it worse so I swallowed it whole and willed it down my throat.

One (rather large) bite was all I was up for, but Jinyang devoured the other half of the brain by himself.

imagine your teeth cutting into the frontal lobe...

I stuck mostly to the safe grub for the rest of the night and thought frequently--while my sweet potatoes cooked in the spiced broth spiked with residual brain juices--of the blood, stomach, colon, and brain soup digesting in my own stomach.