Gross Stuff...In Southeast Asia

There are a million obviously gross things that one might come across in Southeast Asia. Milky shit rivers running wide and deep throughout Indonesian urban areas, a motorbike flattened crusty rat getting wedged between my flip flop and flesh in Saigon, fried pork for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Manila, and a veritable assortment of rotting produce everywhere. Yet some of the grossest things I’ve come across remind me that LA and Southeast Asia? Not so different after all! Case in point, I was walking down Le Thanh Ton St. in Saigon and passed a parked taxi driver fiddling around with something in his car. He then proceeded to exit the vehicle and carefully hang a fresh plastic bag full of urine on a telephone pole. There are plastic bottles full of taxi driver pee all over the city but this is the first plastic bag of pee I’ve seen. This happens in LA all the time I’m sure.




Gross stuff in Southeast Asia also manifests in the form of horrible translations and nascent health practices involving little flesh eating fish. Sometimes though, I can’t help but indulge in very curious gross habits and Singapore might be the cleanest place in the world to do this. I made an appointment with Dr. Fish the other day and let a pool full of miniature fishies eat all the dead skin off my feet and lower legs. At first I didn’t think it was so gross…but then I thought about what was actually occurring – i.e. hundreds of little fish full to the brim with hundreds of different dead skin cells from recent patrons.



Translations into English are also perfect fodder for gross stuff. For instance, I nearly gagged at the possibility of eating a bowl full of the “cream of funny man” at an ice cream parlor in Quy Nhon.



Please keep your children well clear of this “special” swimming pool in Toraja.



But even grosser is this “sandwich” made out of “meat” and “veggies.”




I’ll keep my “eyes” far, far away from your “salami bags,” thank you very much (guest post by Sarah G. Grant)

It has been WAY too long

Hi everybody! So, it's been many many months since my last post here on Gross Stuff in L.A., and well, I'm no longer in L.A. However, rather than start yet another blog with yet another URL, I'm going to leave this up and running, but the gross stuff you see may be from cities other than L.A. In fact, the first one I'm going to put up is a guest post from everyone's favorite foodie, Sarah Grant, from her most recent trip to Southeast Asia. Please tell your friends, enemies, and grandmothers about this blog; I promise you it's gonna take off.

Another mystery totally solved.

If you read back through past entries you will come across a large number of homemade finger bandages we found bloodied in the grass every morning. Guess what? They weren't finger bandages at all, but leg bandages for a tiny Chihuahua that a pudgy man lovingly carried through the neighborhood in the wee morning hours. It was kind of him to discard them on our street every day, and give us a mystery to make life fun.
(Guest post by Andrew)

Mystery not-so solved

After nearly a year of wondering who in their not-at-all right mind was dumping their slops into this little cleared circle near our house, I have finally caught them in the act! I always pictured them creeping out in the pre-dawn hours to dump, but I saw an old woman out there around noon, tossing god-knows-what around. But wait, a few days later I saw a different woman brazenly sloshing the nastiness pictured above out of a bucket. There have been a lot of gross finds in the Offering Circle (hereby shortened to the OC), but this one in particular just turned my stomach. Perhaps it was how fresh it all was, or the combination of ingredients: noodles, chocolate eclairs, tortilla chips, wheat buns, unidentifiable bits, or the copious liquid I saw pouring out of the bucket that no picture can capture.

I really want to ask them the obvious "why?", but I already know they'll just say they're feeding the birds. And then I'll have to point out that birds don't normally eat chocolate eclairs, bone chunks, tortilla chips, fettuccine alfredo, etc, etc the list goes on and on. My new mission is to capture one or both of these ladies on camera for you, gentle reader. Neither lady is particularly remarkable, but if you're like us, you feel like you already know them. Or at least what they've been eating recently.
(Guest posted by Andrew)

Recycling: Fail

I am constantly surprised by how many scenes of discarded clothing we come across in Los Angeles. This pile of unfashionable and moist-looking (didn't touch to confirm dew content) ladystuffs was mere feet from the well-known Offering Circle. Now it's one-stop shopping for sloppy leftover food and padded bras. The previous owner left this mess next to their recycling bin, and I picture them hauling it out to dump into the bin, but then wondering if clothes were even recyclable. Then they realized that there was someone out there, poor and busty, who was in dire need of a bra. Perhaps take the clothes to goodwill (two blocks away) and drop them off? Nah, fuck it, here'll do fine. I would feel a lot better about the large amount of discarded clothing we find if I saw a lot more crazy naked people. Actually, no I wouldn't. (Guest post by Andrew)

Teeth! TEEEEEEEEEETH!!!

The subject line above is what immediately screamed in my head as I perused this pile of discarded clothing while waiting for the bus downtown. There is a lot of cast off clothing here, but then the owner (or angry non-owner) decided to leave a little bit more behind, and extracted two teeth and left them there. Apparently the tooth fairy does not visit the corner of Wilshire and Lucas. This is not only one of the grossest finds this blog has ever come across, but one of the most disturbing as well, especially since these pictures were taken at about four in the afternoon. I don't expect the streets of L.A. to be sparkling, but I would like them sans bloody teeth, if possible. (Guest post by Andrew)

The remains of the day.

At first glance this appears to be the usual mouth-watering assortment of food tidbits that are usually found in the offering circle. Upon closer inspection, however, this offering is unique in that it contains big chunks of bone. In the top picture you can see what appears to be a neck stump toward the bottom, and in the lower picture you can see pieces of what I really hope is not (but is very most likely) spine. Do you know what birds love? Flesh. The bottom picture was taken about five minutes before the top picture. The birds could not get enough of this meaty miasma. I had a strong urge to bag the neck stump and take it to a police station for I.D, but I figured if it were human, it was likely a Fried Green Tomatoes situation and everything had worked itself out. (Guest posted by Andrew)