Traveling for work provided a number of interesting culinary experiences, especially when with my manager. He would try anything, which encouraged the local team to try even harder to find something he would not eat. Don't play that game in Asia
On my first trip to China, a large group of us sat down in a private room at a restaurant. A dish with a large dome of foil on it (looked like Jiffy Pop popcorn) turned out to be deep-fried shrimp on sticks. They were maybe 3/4" in diameter, 6" long in the shell with their eyes looking up at me. Being new to this, I asked my manager about the proper way to eat it. He said, you just eat it... all of it. One of the customers had just gnawed the head off one, so I went for it. Very crunchy. After getting through the first one, I noticed the local guys on our sales team had removed the head and were peeling them.
Then there was the time when I managed to get not one, but two giant gelatinous bits the size of my index finger dipped into a bowl of soup. Pretty sure they were beef tendons cooked until soft but that's only a guess. Based on the texture, I always worked hard to avoid them after that experience.
Someone else mentioned stinky tofu. Yep, I tried it deep fried. It stinks. Unfortunately, when asked if I liked it, I said it was OK, so the whole plate jumped off the lazy susan right in front of me. A little goes a long way and I had enough for a couple of lifetimes that evening.
The camel hoof soup was so spicy hot that I only got a bit of the broth down before giving up. Watching the ladies dance with the 12' long anacondas later wrapped up a memorable evening. I know what you're thinking - same as I was thinking when they said "let's go downstairs and watch the dancers." It wasn't at all what I expected - the only visible skin was faces and hands. Seeing them dance among the audience and wrap the snakes around the other patrons encouraged me to stay waaaayyyy back.
Speaking of snakes, deep fried rattlesnake is OK if a bit greasy. It was fried, how could it be bad? The deep-fried shark we butchered on the tablesaw in the Caymans was good. I can also recommend deep fried ice cream sandwiches dipped in sopaipilla batter.
One item I've always wondered about was a long slender silver-gray thing I ate in China. It was about 1/8" in diameter and 3" long. It looked interesting so I tried one. Initially I thought it must be a vegetable but when I bit down, the crunchiness made me think of bones. Maybe some kind of seafood? They never told me what is was. The julienned jellyfish was like crunchy rice noodles - translucent and tasteless but good with a sauce on it.
When eating Peking duck, evidently the puffed up skin is the delicacy. I preferred the meat which was very good when eaten with sauce on little pancakes. While on the topic of poultry, a common Chinese dish is chunk chicken in clay pots. They cut up a chicken into 2" squares and stuff it into small clay pots about 3" across. Skin, meat and bones all together. It's boiled and then served cold. It's very challenging to eat (especially with an overbite) since you can't remove the bones with chopsticks - you just have to chew around the bones as best as you can then spit them out. If you are at a Chinese truck stop they put Plexiglas on the tables so you can spit the bones out anywhere that is convenient.
Chipped reindeer in a cream sauce with juniper berries is very tasty.
A neighbor gave us some canned bear meat which was great in beef stroganoff. Another neighbor gave us some grouse which was excellent in a mushroom cream sauce.
One of my favorite items was kangaroo tenderloin at the Three Crowns pub in England. The taste of the wild platter included venison, ostrich and kangaroo. Another favorite item was sushi in Japan.
Going out to eat with a group of coworkers in a foreign country definitely broadened my horizons. I never would have dreamed of ordering, much less eating a lot of the items I tried had I been on my own. It was definitely a blessing to experience all the different foods and cultures. If you get a chance to eat something unusual, go for it!
