Tonight, Monday the 15^th, we decided to order room service in our 3-star hotel.  We’d done this before, ordering what we thought were relatively safe dishes. 

Now, Mark has a rule of thumb about what foods he will eat in this country.  He says that if he does not see a color occurring naturally in a positive setting, he will not eat it.  This rules out various shades of yellow, green, orange, and brown – all of which appear with regularity in the menu items here.

I ordered the mushroom soup and the mushroom fried rice.  Safe stuff, even if the principal ingredient grows in the dark on the forest floor amongst the other fungi.  Mark, on the other hand, disregarded his own rules and ordered something he thought he had eaten before in the northern part of this nation.

He made a big mistake.  The food was an orange color, one of those on his “do not eat” list.  He did try it, I’ll give him that.  Later he said, “I knew when I saw it this was going to go poorly,” or something to that effect.

Somebody in the kitchen had a good meal tonight, but Mark ate a small bag of potato chips from the little snack bowl furnished by this establishment.  And I?  I’m full of fungus.