Excerpts From Our Life in Dumaguete

While we are working for Brian we are staying at his apartment in Dumaguete and getting to know the city a bit.  We went to the mall the other day because we heard you could get yogurt at the supermarket there and that it was air-conditiond (the mall, not the yogurt.) Yes, I know how I usually always complain about air conditioning (Giovannina writing) but it is so hot here your brain literally does not work unless you stand under a cold shower or find some other way to cool your core. On days that we are working this is not an issue because we are out of the city and underwater for over 5 hours of the day, but days in the city require some cooling off.  So off to the mall we went where the air was mercifully cool and  we did find yogurt!

Yay for Lactobacillus! The food here has been great but it does wreak havoc on the tummy some times. We have found that it has helped quite a bit while traveling to have a daily bit of yogurt to keep us "healthy."  O.K. maybe to much information but we just listened to a podcast about probiotics (live bacterial cultures like in yogurt or kiefer) and how they are finding that people who eat more yogurt and such are happier and have less anxiety and stress hormones in there system.  It is true - check out the Radiolab podcast on guts.

The other night we went out for beers and Woody got a chance to try balut - aka "eggs with legs" - for the first time. Balut is basically a hard-boiled, fertilized duck egg, including the embryo. When you order it, you can choose how many days of development it has had. This balut was 17 days old. Here is his description of what it was like:
 Kind of like drinking chicken soup out of an egg. First you crack open the top and slurp the broth. Then you dig out the yolk, which is firmer than a chicken egg yolk and tastes more like a dumpling. The embryo is "silky" and a little bit crunchy in parts - must be the beak or some bone just forming. The "white" of the egg is a hard, cartilaginous mass that doesn't taste very good, so I skipped it. I'm glad I ate it at night - I couldn't really tell what it looked like, but it tasted good.

Sunday, April 22, we will head to Siaton for three days of reef surveys with Brian and Oliver. This will take us out of town for a bit and let us see another part of the Negros Oriental coast and give us a room of our own for a couple of nights :)