repost: you know you've lived overseas when...

~originally posted on 10/6/2010~

no, this post isn't about me, though i do live overseas. it's more about an american friend of ours that flew to visit us for a few days. i had a local dinner all planned to cook up for us. as usual, it contained rice. i keep a big container of rice on a shelf to make it more easily accessible. well it turned out that this particular batch of rice had been sitting there for a while. but, i mean, it's rice. it's not going to go bad.

but the little bugs flying around inside my container told me differently.

turns out sometimes there are teeny tiny eggs in the rice. and if it sits there long enough, they hatch. hence the insects on the inside of my closed container.

only slightly embarrassed, i told my hubby he needed to run out and get me some more rice. pronto. fortunately, the friend i was cooking for has spent a large amount of his life living in africa. he came into the kitchen highly interested in checking out my awesome overseas dried rice with essence of insect. after peering into the container, this is what he said...

"well, they're just on the top. i'm sure the rest is fine. let's eat that."

and that, my friends, is when you know you have truly lived overseas.