At the request of a certain cousin-in-law that shall remain nameless I will do my best to increase my blog output! As surprising as it might be I have been extremely busy in the last 5 months and have been faced with the issue of sharing everything I experience over here or choosing a handful of events to write about. I guess in this instance its better to give more information!! Well I do have one interesting story to explain in detail…..eating python snake for dinner.
It all started back in October when my post mate Jonny informed myself and our other post mate, Clay that he had asked Daniel to find python and cook it for us. Daniel is the cook and owner of La Souvenir restaurant in Nati that we usually visit at least once a week if not more. Daniel is a great chef. He cooks good chicken, fries, rice, and couscous with this awesome sauce. Jonny helped Daniel improve his restaurant and also made it popular among many volunteers. Jonny has also become good friends with Daniel and I plan on working with him regarding some savings and marketing things after the holidays. So Jonny and Daniel had a conversation about eating/preparing python and Jonny decided that we were all going to try snake!
I am one for experimenting with new things and being adventurous every now and then (I mean I moved to West Africa ) but every time I thought about eating snake I just envisioned a huge chunk of snake like the one from that movie with Jennifer Lopez, Anaconda, laying on the plate…my mouth didn’t exactly start watering when I thought about eating snake….but you can believe that I sure wasn’t going to not at least take a bite. A few weeks ago Jonny mentioned that Daniel was having trouble finding snake so it might be a while before we could try it….not gonna lie I was a bit relieved. I figured I had gained hopefully 2 months to mental prepare myself for eating python.
Yesterday Saturday December 11, I went with 4 other volunteers to Materi, Benin to attend the official inauguration of a school building with 3 classrooms that the volunteer who lives their built. Jamie is an English teacher at the CEG (Collège D'Enseignement Général, the same as high schools) in Materi and she raised funds to have 3 new classrooms built. It was awesome to see the work that she has done and the joy that she has brought to her village. Brittany, the English teacher volunteer in Toucountouna (a neighboring village to Natitingou) and I are going to also try and raise money to build three new classrooms at her CEG. More information to come on this project!! Anyways the previous 2 nights I hadn’t slept well or gotten enough sleep so I was extremely tired. In the car on the way to Materi I received a text message from Jonny saying “We are eating PYTHON at Daniel’s tonight”. I was completely surprised and worried! I wasn’t prepared to eat snake!
After spending a wonderful day seeing Materi and the work Jamie had done we headed back to Nati. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to relax and nap before dinner so I was really tired when we headed to Daniel’s. Also since I didn’t know what to expect I decided that I was going to eat least take a bite…that was unless they served someone the face of the snake, then I wasn’t exactly sure what my reaction was going to be. (You know when you are in the situation where you have no idea what to expect so you always picture the worst case scenario, well that sure was me) Ok I will skip to when the plates came out. Fortunately at Daniel’s you eat outside under a straw rough and the lighting is pretty poor. There were 5 other volunteers and myself at Daniel’s. We all received a plate with two pieces of snake about 5 inches long the circumference of a steering wheel and rice. At first it wasn’t bad. We all just looked at the plate and decided how to eat it…some went right in and ate it like a chicken wing while I decided to knife and fork it! All I can say is it actually taste good, like chicken only sweeter. It’s just really difficult to get past the skin and spine. The spine moves just like a snake moves (I know that is a stupid explanation but I can’t think of any other way to describe how weird it was). There were surprisingly a lot of bones coming off the spine. Also there were a lot of organs….I’ll just leave it at that.
All in all python essentially tastes good but you have to be mentally prepared to deal with the thoughts of eating a snake. I am proud to say that I have eaten python, don’t tell anyone I didn’t finish it all though!!
