After stopping (very) briefly in Japan, the boat made its way to Singapore, but Mike chose to skip the zoo this time and only do a little Christmas shopping, because he had the opportunity to visit the Mecca of exotic foods, the Imperial Herbal Restaurant, located on the third floor of the Metropole Hotel. For a taste of the strange foods that Mike sampled during this deployment, please take a look at the deep-fried scorpions served on shrimp toast right.
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Much of the remainder of the deployment was spent in the Arabian Gulf. Due to heightened.. er, TENSIONS in the region, we were at a higher state of alert and security was pretty tight. As a result, although we managed to get out in town during the three weeks or so that we were in the Kingdom of Bahrain (total), we didn't get to sample the nightlife quite as liberally as many of us would have wanted. Still, we had an excellent opportunity to see the culture and spend exorbitant amounts of American currency on rugs and gold.
Here is a bakery where three gentlemen who I swear must have lost all their sweat glands in the last war make bread for sale to the surrounding neighborhood in a shop that you could probably bake bread by holding the dough close to that blast furnace they call an oven.
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Before we left, there were a few maintenance items that needed to be done, including an inspection and radiation survey of the diesel storage tank. Guess who got volunteered to dive in?
These weren't bad, more texture than real flavor, and though the venom was long-since denatured by the intense heat of cooking, it took Mike by surprise when the still-intact stinger embedded itself in the roof of his mouth when he bit in. After a brief moment of panic, he managed to compose himself and munch through the rest of the critter. (For more details of his culinary adventures, you'll have to wait for the book to come out, or maybe you can just get him talking; maybe you'll hear the balut story i.e. the "treat with feet" or "eggs with legs" as seen on "Fear Factor!")
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We next stopped in Phuket, Thailand, a great little tourist destination which offers a much wider variety of entertainments than Phattaya Beach did back in 1999 (again, you'll just have to read the book for details, but P-Beach made Las Vegas look like a Sunday church social). You can see a demonstration of elephant handling performed at a Thai Cultural Center, which also featured dance and martial arts performances inside a large amphitheater.
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Here are some men making serving ware and tourist trinkets at a ceramics shop in town.
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And yes, here I am riding the obligatory camel. As exotic and exciting as this sounds, these are not the most elegant creatures, nor are they even particularly pleasing to smell, and definitely one of the least friendly domesticated members of the animal kingdom I have yet encountered. Still, beats walking...
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