Unfamiliar

When you walk in they hand you its still-beating heart in a shot glass of its own blood.

Actually, they hand you its still beating heart in a shot glass of its own blood and some fermented bile. If you're a wuss, you shun it. Turn it away in disgust. In disbelief of so savage an act.

But if you are a true traveler, you grab it. You gulp it down. You try something new - or rather something old. You embrace the carnivore inside. You return to your roots. Instead of cringing at the loss of this beasts life, you accept the reality that you and he will become one anyhow. That each day when you have a burger, when you eat chicken in the street you've derprived a similar being of its independence. You devour his life-giving organ, as fresh as it can be.

I, my friends, am a wuss. So is Ben.

We stumble upstairs, leaving the heart to soak in the liquid it once pumped. But in our defense, we did partake in the blood and bile. We drank from the fountain of savagery, we embraced the carnivour. We just needed someone to hold our hand. We needed baby steps, apparently.

And then we ate the rest of him. Boiled him, fried him, wrapped him, rolled him. At him like chicken off the bone. As chowder. As soup. If bubba were here, he's still be telling forest all the different ways we discovered to serve him up.

We drank from the liquid in the tank soaking hundreds of snakes. It nearly made me puke, but I did it more than once.

And all the while we got to know our host a little better. The receptionist from our hotel who brought us here. The man with whom we enjoyed our first glass of snake blood; and whose name we did not know until the cab ride home.

And then we washed it all down with a few beers on the street corner.