Mondongo

Today I went out to lunch with Johanna Liander, the head of the Romance Languages & Literature department at Harvard, my Spanish professor my first semester as a freshman, and the head of the Harvard Summer Study Abroad program here in Buenos Aires. She is an awesome person, and is one of the professors I am closest to at school. We ate a ton of super yummy stuff – a squash/corn/cheese mixture, rice with mushrooms in an interesting sauce that I couldn't even begin to describe, and a big salad. At the time, I didn't have near enough room in my stomach to finish everything, let alone order a dessert.

But on the way home, I got one of those sudden cravings for chocolate that are the reason why I am putting off buying food gifts for people until the day I leave – if there is chocolate available in my room and I get a craving, I will eat it. Today it hit me on the street though, so I unfortunately was able to indulge my craving with approximately 1,000,000 calories of chocolate (more or less – let's just say it was about similar to when I ate an entire chocolate bunny in one sitting this Easter).

Between the lunch and the chocolate, I was not very hungry for dinner. So when I walked into the kitchen and saw what appeared to be seafood on my plate, I was not too excited. I'm not a huge fan of most types of seafood, so it's not my favorite even when I'm super hungry. But I also hate to be rude, so I had every intention of eating everything that I had been served.

(This is approximately what I was given to eat, except for with a lot less of the other stuff and lot more of the octopus-looking stuff.)

However, this was one of the only times in my life that I could not force myself to eat something. I had one bite, and it just gave me the creeps. The texture, the look of it... I asked my host mom what kind of seafood it was, and was a little confused when she told me it was not seafood, but cow. At that point, I knew I wasn't going to be finishing it, because the only part of the cow that meat like that could have come from is an area that I really have no interest in consuming.

Sure enough, when I looked it up on Google later, I discovered that what I had tasted was cow stomach (the dish is called "mondongo").

I think I'm just really not adventurous enough for some cuisine...