Saturday, June 21, 2014

An Adventure in Food

On our last Wednesday there, were were on our way back to the capital city, Yaounde. We hired out a bus to take us, and we had lots of ups and downs on that trip, but one of our ups was when we passed through one check-point. There are various places along the road where the army checks your papers and takes a traveling fee. Also at these check-points are people selling food, so you open the window, give them money, and they give you a bag of peanuts, or whatever they are selling. At one check-point we saw these things that looked like raisins, and we were curious, because they don't have grapes there. So we bought some.

We started eating them, and they were like nuts, but didn't really have any flavor. They were a little bitter and not good, but not inedible (like kola nut). So we pass them around the bus and no one is really impressed. Then we give them to our teammate sitting by the driver. The driver looks over and goes, "No! No! You don't eat that! Who bought that?!" It turns out we had bought a spice. People cook them and put them in their food, but nobody eats them raw. 

Later on we were telling our driver to the airport about what we had done, and he could not stop laughing. He thought it was the funniest thing that these white people had come in and just tried everything. He said, "I'm impressed by missionaries because they aren't afraid to eat things. They just come in and eat whatever they think the locals are eating, and sometimes they eat the funniest things!"
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We never got into serious trouble as a team, we never offended the king or anything, but we were always doing something not quite right and having other people laugh with us.

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