Philippines

“You slurp, like so.”
With a smack, the man cracked them cooked egg on his head. The children sat around him, grinning toothily and eyes glistening. Using his mouth like a vacuum, he slurped through the crevasse of the egg. He began chew voraciously. Occasionally, I heard the sound of crunching. Cooked eggs weren’t crunchy, were they? I was pretty sure “eggs with crunchy substance” did not exist in my usual breakfast menu back at home.

However, I wasn’t at home. The comfort of eating the usual yellow scrambled chicken egg did not exist in this situation. Chicken eggs? No, these were duck eggs. To be specific, these were duck eggs that were incubated for seven days.

Before I knew it, I exchanged a few pesos and received my egg; the man exited off the stage with a “salamat po”– “thank you.” Heck, I was in the Philippines and was about to eat an incubated duck egg.

Previously, the local children pulled on my wet from sweat t-shirt and dragged me towards the beach. Before I could dream about ending the day with the ocean’s waves singing me to sleep, my reverie was shattered with yips and yells. Some children had flagged down a street vendor selling “balut”. I had heard about this special Filipino delicacy but at the time, I dismissed it as if it was part of an extraordinary fairy tale. “Crazy,” I had muttered.

Then the time came. I peeled open my fingers one by one, displaying the egg; simultaneously, the audience held their breath in anticipation. The egg felt warm under the clammy touch of my hand. Speckled with dots here and there, I tossed it back and forth between my hands. Plucking out bits and pieces of the shell, I reached the rubbery texture of the egg. Before I had second thoughts, I felt my teeth sink in. My tongue embraced a mixture of flavours and consistency: a little bit of dry yolk, an occasional crunch of a duck beak, some feathers, and the slippery quality of a hard boiled egg.

Roaring with laughter and shoulders shaking, the children ran and danced around me. Even the vendor, watched from afar, held his hand to his mouth to stop the giggles. I joined the hubbub, stomping my feet in the sand. In that moment, I forgot about the heat of the weather. I felt the salt of the sea with sand caked between my fingernails and the breeze of the ocean. Every time the children moved around, the warmth of their bodies surrounded me. With an egg shell in one hand, I bowed, ending my performance with the words, “Salamat po.”