Finger Food

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Ben had been told about an Indian restaurant in town with an all-you-can-eat special for fifteen soles. So on Sunday, his last day in Cuzco, he hit the Plaza de Armas in search of a late lunch.

Twenty minutes scouring the Plaza without results had him desperate. After a week of veggie meals, Ben craved all the protein he could stuff into his guts. Why hadn't he at least asked the name of the restaurant? Admitting defeat and leaving the Plaza by its southwestern corner, he spotted "The Indian Restaurant": maybe asking for a name wasn't necessary after all.

It wasn't Bombay, but curried meat on rice is pretty hard to get wrong and Ben enjoyed his first plate. As he was cleaning off the last of the rice, he looked up at the waiter to see him with his finger in his nose.

Ben was willing to admit to being a bit of a picker himself (isn’t everyone from time to time) so he wasn’t about to get on his high horse about a bloke who wasn’t touching the food going for a little digital exploration of his nasal cavity. But a brief exploration it was not - this was Magellan circumnavigating the Earth. He was two knuckles deep, digging away, pulling out his finger to inspect and then ramming it right back up there. It went on for perhaps a minute or so before he got a tissue. But rather than use it to blow his nose, he simply used it as an outer coating for his finger and continued scratching the back of his eyeball.

In this horror movie´s most gruesome scene, Ben saw one of the waiter’s co-workers catch him at it - a waitress who had been standing by the coffee machine. Based on her age and the fact that she was actually of (sub-continental) Indian descent, Ben assumed that she was either the owner or at least a manager. Ben waited for her to stop the waiter - tell him to take it outside at the very least. But she asked him some innocuous question and they had a conversation (in a language Ben didn’t understand) whilst he continued picking. It didn’t bother her in the slightest.

Ben went back for a second plate - the first one had been low on meat content and he wasn’t going to pay 15 soles for a dish of rice and veggies - but he couldn’t finish it. Any salty flavour or even slightly slippery texture ceased being an eastern delicacy and instead became the contents of a full Kleenex in his mouth.

http://s7.zetaboards.com/PPooDD/topic/8387271/1

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