Don't Always Trust the Street Food!

A tale as old as time: traveling through Asia, somebody eats the street food and ends up spending the next 24 hours in the bathroom, vomiting up everything they've ever eaten and swearing off street food forever. This was almost my fate.

For a little background, I don't eat any shellfish, and I never eat raw fish. I find it disgusting and I literally NEVER eat it. So imagine my mom's surprise when I saw a man walking down the beach with a bucket of the weirdest looking seafood EVER, and my response was, "I have to eat that."

TikTok has led me astray once before. When we had our phones stolen in Peru, it's because we went to a place recommended to me through a video on YouTube, and I had no idea that it was one of the more dangerous places in Lima! TikTok tried to ruin my life again, but this time, with sea urchins.

There is a lovely family on social media that shows their lives as indigenous people of New Zealand. They have a super cute daughter, and they often show her eating out of the spiky, black shell of a sea urchin. What I didn't know was that to eat them correctly, you need to know the specific sea urchin that is edible, AND you need to eat them fresh out of the water. But when I saw the opportunity before me, I couldn't turn it down.

First of all, I was ripped off. Here's the thing...in Asia, you're expected to haggle. But I just can't bring myself to do it! I feel so absolutely rude, and I just can't. So when the guy asked for 3,000 Sri Lankan rupees (about $10) for the sea urchin, I said yes. Maybe I can't even say I was ripped off - I'm sure he was waiting for me to haggle it down!

He cracked it open for me and scraped down it's orange innards from the sides, squeezing some lime on top. Without even a second of hesitation, I ate it! It was a bit slimy, and kind of bland tasting, and I didn't hate it at all. I made Andrés and Mama taste it, and they both said it tasted like boogers. I was blinded by social media.

As I was eating it, the lady from the restaurant we were eating at on the beach came up to us with a pretty scary warning: "If you get sick later today, please know that it's from the sea urchin, not from our restaurant." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Those always make people sick. The man doesn't give them to you fresh. That's a rotten sea urchin."

I stopped dead in my tracks. Rotten seafood. Excellent.

"If you don't believe me, ask the guy over there." She pointed to a man lounging on a sun chair. "He got super sick from it yesterday."

Needless to say, we didn't eat anymore, but it was too late. I was terrified. I had eaten more rotten seafood than I should have, which is any at all. After a quick search through Chatgpt, we found out that if we didn't feel sick within the next two hours, we'd be good to go. I swear to you, the stress pain that hit my stomach had me so scared!

So we swam in the beautiful ocean for the next two hours, and nobody ended up sick, but we did learn two very valuable lessons: 1. Don't always trust the seafood 2. Never trust TikTok.