So can anyone top a dozen raw oysters in Marrakech?
Hangover in Marrakech
Not so many years ago I found myself sharing a hotel room with Will in Marrakech, we were both violently hung-over, and I sick as a dog from the dozen raw oysters from the night before. After a visit to the porcelain goddess I returned to our room to find Will slugging down a belt of pepper vodka, quelling another round of the urka gurkas I sat on my bed and glumly contemplated the prospect of breakfast. Lying back on the bed with one foot firmly planted on the ground I told Will a story and it went something like this.
1995 and I'm in very rural China on a collaborative paleontological expedition with our Chinese colleagues looking for the usual, dinosaurs, amphibians, and early mammals. The village that we were staying in is the sort that early in the morning one can see emerging from chimneys wood smoke as the inhabitants sequentially fired up their ovens. A bucolic sort of place where roosters crowed at dawn and dusk, and three hundred pound pigs would amble down the red clay streets, a quiet place the ambient noise strange to western ears.
My idea of a large breakfast is a bagel with my coffee, not so with my Chinese hosts for every morning we were ushered to the dining room where, on a large round table, we were urged to eat a very large bowl of noodles. My stomach would churn at the sight of the steaming bowls of noodles and I would struggle to finish my bowl. My Chinese hosts many of whom were veterans of Mao's Cultural Revolution devoured their bowls with alacrity. Eventually, in what I thought was a brilliant maneuver, I requested a 'smaller' bowl. I explained to them that I was a light eater at breakfast and after much interpreting and conversation it was settled . . .or so I thought. For there on the round table, the next morning, lay seven bowls of steaming noodles but my bowl was the same size as yesterdays whilst everyone else had "much" larger bowls.
Will blearily looked at me and after taking another slug of vodka said "Bill you stupid f***, you don't know much about China, do you."
In remembrance,
Reaux
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