Snakes, Guns and Balut

Bucket List Item #2: Eating Balut-CHECK

Manila, Philippines

I was hanging out with two girls, Océano from Scotland and Caro from Costa Rica, one night in my hostel in Manila. The owners Mark and Dolly had invited us to a small gathering at a longtime friend’s house. We took them up on their invite and I was pretty excited to meet a local (one item always on my bucket list) and visit a real Filipino home.

We were welcomed in by a middle-aged man named Jerome. He had recently renovated his house so he gave us a tour of his open-air, artistic, modern style home. He showed us his attic that was also in the process of becoming a “man cave,” which was full of awards, trophies and medals. He was a professional shooter and apparently really good at it. Throughout the night I came to the conclusion he was kind of a big deal. After ooing and ahhing and asking him questions about the sport and a bit about his life, we sat around the big handmade dining room table. He offered us drinks, food and a bowl of damp peanuts, asked us about our lives and we laughed and chatted about the Philippines.

While on the topic of food, I brought up a Filipino delicacy called balut, typically eaten after downing a few beers (I couldn’t imagine eating it without the beer goggles on so it made sense). His eyes immediately lit up.

“Have you tried it?!”

“No,” I replied hesitantly. “But, it’s on my bucket list so EVENTUALLY I will.”

“Do you want to right now?! I’ll get some!”

“Um..not really.” I giggled. “Well..maybe. Ah let me think about it.” The only excuse I was able to dig up was the fact that I wasn’t drinking.

“Nah, you don’t have to drink to eat it. People eat them all the time. It just taste better when your tipsy. Kind of like french fries and pizza for Americans.”

“But, I think it would be easier to have some liquid courage don’t you?” I nervously tried to convince him.

Three minutes later, I found myself randomly faced with the opportunity to fulfill the bucket list item I was least excited about. I was about to eat balut; an egg containing a developing duck embryo. Yup, it has a face and everything that goes along with it. It looks as gross as it sounds and I was slightly regretting the fact that I had it on my list to begin with. I had first heard of the odd food on a travel show and was disgusted watching someone devour the little bird, but as always, I like to try weird things so it had to go on the list. I didn’t want to disappoint myself especially knowing the chance to try it was right in front of my face as was I honestly going to take the initiative later to find one on my own?

I wasn’t going to drink so I had to quickly find some sober courage. My stomach instantly dropped and I started to sweat a bit while he prepared the yummy treat. The two other girls, understandably, did not want to participate with me although I tried to remind them that they might regret missing out on a wonderful opportunity.

He handed me the warm, liquid-filled creature. “It’s ready!”

I held for it for a while, peeking inside the cracked egg shell to see what I was getting myself into.

“No, don’t look at it or dissect it. It makes it worse.” Dolly cautioned across the table.

I looked around and everyone in the room was silently staring; excited for my reaction. I took a deep breath and slowly brought my lips to the snack. I had a lot running through my head but I tried to imagine a regular egg. No big deal right? I took a sip of the broth surrounding the embryo.

“Hmm..not bad actually. Tastes like chicken noodle soup.” I paused another 30 seconds, still reluctant to eat the whole thing. At this point I not only didn’t want to let myself down, but I also didn’t want to disappoint my audience. I took another deep breath, “Well, ok..here I go.”

It really wasn’t that bad. There were no weird textures and I didn’t chew into a beak or get any feathers stuck in my teeth. Jerome told me I had eaten the youngest balut, 16 days old. It starts getting more delicious the older the embryo. Some people enjoy it all the way up to 21 days and that’s where it gets interesting. But, I did it once so I was satisfied.

Apparently that didn’t make the night interesting enough so Jerome starting talking about his seven pet snakes and the tiger he had in the zoo. We didn’t believe him and just laughed it off. He yelled something to his friend and suddenly there was a white snake near the table to prove it. While my fear of snakes has gotten better over the years I still wasn’t crazy about having it around. Of course he tried to convince us to hold it but no thanks! I DID NOT put that on my bucket list so it was easy to pass that one up. He brought out another snake and at that point we knew we wasn’t joking about having five more and a tiger so we stopped asking about them. I do have to say the white one was pretty neat, but from a distance.

To break the snake tension we asked Jerome more about his profession as a shooter. We should have known by then that whatever we asked him would magically appear before our eyes without notice. And that is exactly what happened. His friend brought two pistol cases to the table and Jerome excitedly opened them to show us his toys. He assured us they weren’t loaded and handed it to me. I hesitantly took his offer, examined it and passed it on. We all felt a bit weird at first, but eventually just laughed at how random and bizarre everything was. Not sure how the idea came up, but we decided to take Charlie’s Angels photos to end the night with a bang.

Would you consider eating balut?