Growing up Creepy pt.4 ~ "LICE in my RICE!!!"

Hey ya'll!!!

Now, I've never been one to be adventurous, least of all when it comes to food... but I must admit I have done some pretty amazing gastronomic stunts on the rare occasions when I actually feel like it. Tarantulas, bamboo worms and duck embryo are just some of the creepy, crawly and strange things I've put into my system in my day. But there is a difference, I suppose, between going to a market in Thailand and purchasing creepy crawlies for food and having one show up unexpectedly in your dinner!!! Which, reminds me of an incident which happened to a friend of mine a couple of years ago.

Now, I know this girl from college, an Indonesian girl (not that her nationality has anything to do with the story) and she was very pretty. Not too bright, though, but that's also besides the point.  So, one day, this friend of mine was feeling rather hungry and she decided to go make herself some fried rice. After making the rice, though, someone calls her up and asks her out for a movie and she agrees. But the rice was still too hot to store in the fridge and the movie was starting soon so what she does is she leaves it on the kitchen table but covers it with one of those.... cage thingies... you know, the ones to keep the insects out.

So this friend of mine, she goes for her movie and watches it and by the time it finishes it was already quite late and she was feeling hungry. Her friend suggested that they head to the nearest McDonalds or 24 hour mamak but I suppose she must have not felt like fast food and opted to go home instead, remembering she still had the fried rice from earlier. Problem is, when she went home, that the rice had already gotten cold but I suppose it was just a small matter of heating it up against because that's exactly what she did. So then my friend, with her steaming bowl of fried rice sat down in front of the TV and contentedly enjoyed the meal she had so painstakingly prepared for herself.

As she was swallowing down mouthfuls of rice though, she tasted something peculiar in one particular bite. It was pungently sour, but also slightly sweet. There was a somewhat leathery texture to each bite, like chewing down on a particularly fibrous piece of vegetable. And that's what she thought it was, a particularly fibrous and overcooked leaf of lettuce. And so she chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed, until it became evident that that "fibrous vegetable" was not going to go down, and so she spat what was left into a tissue. This is what she saw:

Or... something like this anyway considering how she'd already swallowed most of the other bits (the chewy fibrous part was the wing... or so I was told). Meanwhile I'm happy to say that nothing quite as unexpectedly nasty has ever happened to me in my life and I suppose it is only natural that I now seem almost thankful for my almost-OCD like quality for picking through my food before I eat it.  I suppose the closest I would get to experiencing something like this would be the time I found a baby cockroach in my breakfast (FOUND, but not eaten...) or the time a lizard decided to take a couple of licks off a tiramisu cake I had left on the kitchen table for five minutes (incidentally my dad ate the cake before I could get back to it and till this day, remains non the wiser) but I suppose those stories weren't nearly half as exciting as this one.