dead things

I remember being very concerned when I found out, as a child, that eggs are actually from a chicken and that's how baby chickens develop. Every time I cracked an egg, I feared there would be a chicken inside that was more developed than most and I would be totally grossed out. Relief, then, flooded over me when I later learned that the eggs we commonly eat are actually unfertilized eggs -- so the yolk is not actually a really young baby chicken per se and there is no need to worry about cracking open an egg with a chicken inside.

Or so I thought.

Here in China, my roommates and I usually buy our eggs from the lady on the street corner. She's really sweet and gives us a good deal on the eggs that sit in big bins out on the sidewalk. But one day recently, my roommate was at the big, fancy, foreign-owned "everything" store (like Wal-mart, except that here these kinds of stores are the expensive ones). Since she was there, she decided to just pick up a carton of eggs there for convenience sake, despite the fact that the eggs were probably more than twice as expensive as the ones on the street. No problem, she figured. At least they would be good, since cartoned eggs actually go through inspections in a way the street eggs don't.

Ah, but inspections are guarantees of nothing sometimes.

By the time my roommate got home, she realized that the carton of eggs she had purchased smelled absolutely horrendously. And as soon as she walked in the apartment, I knew it too. It was awful. So we took them in the kitchen and started to do our own inspection. Thankfully, our Chinese roommate soon got home as well and joined us in the effort.

We eventually narrowed down the smell to one individual egg. Nasty. So since our Chinese roommate is our go-to person for anything us "foreigners" are grossed out by here in China, we made her crack it open. Of course, we knew it had gone bad -- that much was obvious. So I expected some nasty red ooze or something like that.

But no.

It was a chicken.

A dead chicken, of course. The smell gave that away.

But a chicken with fuzz and filling the egg completely.

Let me tell you, that is one of the nastiest things I've ever seen. If it hadn't smelled so bad, I might have just been intrigued enough to do some science on the thing. But it reeked. So after more than a few screams at the fact that we had just cracked open an egg with a chicken inside, we quickly disposed of the thing outside our apartment. We get enough bad smells coming from our drains... we didn't need any more from the garbage can.

But the good news, for those of you who can relate to the concerns I had as a child, is that I highly doubt you'll ever just crack open a regular egg and completely unsuspectingly find a chicken inside. Unless your nose has absolutely no sense of smell at all, the smell will certainly give away that there's something weird about the egg.

As if finding a dead chicken in an egg isn't bad enough, the next week I was walking by a trash collecting area, where people from a nearby apartment complex come dispose of their garbage. It disturbed me greatly to see a rat by the garbage. Not that I don't see rats by garbage fairly frequently here, and usually I'm okay with it. Seems relatively natural, and I certainly would rather see rats by garbage areas than in other places. But what disturbed me this time was to see a dead rat by the garbage. Any garbage that is potent enough to kill the rats is pretty disturbing!