Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Meat-eater Germans

A few days back, one of my colleague invited the whole research group to his town Bingen. It is a small town located on Germany's biggest Rhine river in the most beautiful of areas. It is a hilly area with lots of grape fields and forest. That's why this area is called weinstraße (wine-street). The river curls through the valleys hosting the largest density of castles in the world. It has 40 castles in just 65 kilometers. We took chair-lifts, walked through the forests on hills viewing the rhine river below and the small towns located on it and took small cable-cars. We also visited the statue called "Germania". It is the statue of a woman representing Germany.

In the evening, our colleague took us deep inside the town to a restaurant to have a special dinner. This restaurant had seats in its lawn with wines growing long to produce a roof. I as usual looked for fish and ordered smoked fish. When it came, i was surprised to see red slices of fish meat spread across the plate. I tasted it only to find out that it was uncooked. My colleagues told me that it was only half-cooked. I somehow managed to finish it, trying to keep it down my stomach. By that time others had finished their dishes and a couple of them had ordered some snacks containing some sort of meshed tomatos. When i proudly announced that i had finished the fish, they asked me: "do you know what we are eating?". Upon accepting my ignorance, they declared they were eating what many Germans eat: beef. Not just beef, raw beef!!! completely uncooked. I watched them in utter disbelief as they continued eating it with bread and butter.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In Japan, raw fish is very famous (if I am not wrong, they call it "sushi"). So dont be amazed:) They eat almost everything out of sea, cooked and un-cooked! The Japanese rice are another special item to be mentioned!

s.m.

Yasir Niaz Khan said...

True. In fact i did enjoy a "sushi" last year but i prefered ordering the cooked version. My friend's experience at
Tales of Tokyo, Japan

Anonymous said...

just yesterday, I was offered with a plate of fried rice hoppers (just like grass-hoppers), in full shape ;)
s.m.

Saad Sheikh said...

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