California Long Beach Mission

Long Beach is predominantly Hispanic, but there also is a very large Cambodian and Filipino population. And so besides the amazing Mexican food that you get, you also will get some wild Asian food and Filipino food. I think the craziest thing that I ate while I was in Long Beach was a had something called Balut, which is an egg where the chick is partially developed. So when you eat it, you're biting into bones and feathers and things like that. And it was disgusting.

The California Long Beach Mission has a lot of different cultures, and as such, there was a lot of opportunities to try different foods. I wasn't given a lot of crazy foods that were gross. I was given a lot of new foods that were really good, but what my companion and I enjoyed doing was going to like the Asian or the Hispanic markets and trying something new on P-Day. That led us to try pho and glass noodles, um, mochi, just all kinds of stuff, and some of it was really good, and some of it we never bought again, but it was a lot of fun.

I had babaw, which is like a Cambodian rice soup with some noodles and meat, and within it was these jello squares. Well, they looked like jello squares, but they were coagulated pig's blood, and you ate that and it kind of melted in your mouth. Pretty interesting taste, pretty interesting texture. And with that babaw was also just like straight pig's leg, but they'd kind of cooked, and you just kind of rip the meat off of it and eat it. And that was probably the craziest thing. That are crickets, but that's not super crazy.

At least in the Hispanic community. A lot of the things they make you are pretty similar to things you usually eat, but they like to leave the bones in things for some reason. So you'll get a lot of, like, chicken soup, but it's just chicken with the bones still in it. Be prepared to eat a lot of tortillas. They will feed you as much tortillas as anything else. And you'll probably want to get used to eating spicy food. You'll hear a lot of Hispanics refer to menudo, which is cow intestine. Personally, I did not like it at all. Some people do. But there's a lot of different kinds of tacos. There's cabeza, cow head, there's tongue, there's entrails, and so everyone has their personal preference with that. Once I got fed octopus in a soup, so that was interesting. But they'll pretty much use any part of the cow. Pretty much any part of any animal they eat.