I will do anything for food, but I won't eat liver

It had to happen eventually.  I'm only surprised that it took this long.  Yes, after roughly a month of street food adventures, I finally had a bad meal in Taipei.  Up till now I've been remarkably successful in my campaign of "point and eat".  I wouldn't always know what I was in for, but things usually turned out alright.  And then I went up against the Vietnamese street-cart restaurant around the corner.  This was not my first visit.  I had previously enjoyed a lovely meal of grilled pork with my roommate Linnea, during which we noticed a diner next to us enjoying a vibrant curry.  Naturally I wanted to return to try it, and we thought we had identified the picture on the cart that would lead me to curry shangri-la.  Reader, it was not curry.  Not by a long shot. 

Let me set the scene: a sweaty, hungry, pasty white girl wanders down a dark alleyway, determined to feast on curry goodness.  Stray pets languidly walk by.  A small child is almost hit by a scooter, and his mother apologizes upon seeing that I almost went into cardiac arrest (apparently my delicate western sensibilities were the only things in danger).  I brush my gooey, wet hair back from my glistening, salty face as I arrive at my destination - the random Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall.  I should explain that the line between street food and restaurant food is extremely thin here in Taipei.  Your standard eating establishment consists of a sticky, poorly outifitted room at the back, and a food cart of varying dimensions at the front.  This is not a problem, as the food is usually excellent and cheap, and apparently I have very fluid standards of hygiene.  So I approach the Vietnamese cart-restaurant, utter one of my three Chinese phrases ("ni hao!") and with a huge grin on my albino-esque face proceed to point at the item I believe to be curry.  My smile falters as I watch the proprietor start to fill a bowl with a dishwater brown broth, some strips of something white, and huge brown chunks of a mysterious substance.  Oh well, I say to myself.  I guess I just ordered some sort of tofu and vegetable soup.  How bad could it be?  And I walked home with my bucket of nastiness. 

Once home I assembled my meal.  When ordering a noodle soup to go, it is customary to receive two plastic bags: one filled with broth, one filled with noodles.  Naturally I appreciate the concern for proper noodle texture.  I dumped the noodles into one of our two bowls, and then poured the soup over it.  Slowly my situation becomes clear:  those huge brown chunky things?  They have a slick exterior and a porous red interior.  They can be only one thing.  Clearly I have ordered liver soup.  I throw up a bit in my mouth.

It cannot be denied that I am an adventurous eater.  There are few things I don't like, and fewer things that I won't at least try.  But liver just freaks me the hell out.  It looks nasty, smells bad, and the texture is just wrong.  Squishy.  Evil.  And at the moment this textural oddity is compounded by the fact that these immense cubes of liver have been simmering in broth for god knows how long.  i "slice" into one with my chopsticks.  I try to steel myself for the first taste.  I can do this, I tell myself.  I am a strong, confident woman who has enjoyed organ meat cooked in a variety of ways.  I will not be conquered by nightmarket soup.  Really, if Abraham Lincoln could save our country from vampires, I could certainly eat liver.

But you know, maybe it would be a good idea to ease into it by trying the broth first.  And the noodles.  And the tofu.  And the vegetables.  And the random white strips of something.  Maybe the real way to prepare yourself to eat liver is to eat everything else first so that you're no longer hungry.  So I explore the other elements of the soup.  It was, how shall I put it, awful.  Terrible.  Really, really bad.  The huge hunk of fried tofu tasted like wet sponge.  The broth was simultaneously bland and yet...somehow....bitter.  And metallic.  And wrong.  And those random white strips of something?   They were reminiscent of soggy potato chips.  I could not go on.  I had to admit defeat.  I re-packaged my Vietnamese surprise and hightailed it back to the nightmarket where I soothed my sorrows in the only fitting way: deep-fried egg fritter, extra la.

This is one of my favorite nightmarket snacks: a disc of dough is dropped into a vat of boiling vegetable oil, quickly followed by a freshly cracked egg.  Egg meets dough, and the two perform a graceful, greasy dance in the tub of hot liquid.  After a moment's rest, my egg fritter was slathered with a gingery soy sauce and the requisite la.  I took my prize home and erased the memory of the terrifying liver soup from my mind.

And that would have been the end of my story, had I not wandered onto the internet looking for a picture of this horrid liver concoction to give my tale a bit more authority.  This is how I discovered that liver had no role in that meal.  No, the white strips of randomness were slices of steamed pork loaf (*shiver*), and the huge brown globs of mystery meat were, in fact, chunks of congealed pig's blood (*vomit*).  Sometimes a little knowledge can be a terrible thing.  And I may be off mystery meat for a while.