Smile! You're Eating a Smiley!

[Want to see the video of this whole event? Search for 'Gugulethu lrcarlin' on YouTube. You should find 2 different videos.]

For some reason, I woke up this morning with a pounding headache and struggled to get out of bed. I made it to work and the rest of the early day was pretty rough (it turned out to be a 2 coffee and 1 tea morning), but I managed to get through it all---excel spreadsheets and organizing folders completely in disarray were my intern-ly duties for this day and were much more difficult when you’re not feeling well. Anyways, by the time 2pm rolled around, I was more than ready to head out of the office and into the township. Little did I know what the next 2 hours held for me…..

We all climbed into our mini bus taxi for transport out to the various schools where we teach and had a lively discussion about township life, but more specifically—township food. What some of you may not know is that all along the roadside in the townships there are men and women shearing the wool and shaving the skin off of animals in preparation for cooking them over an open fire. There is a specific type of fire roasted delicacy called a “smiley” which always intrigued me the last time I was here. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to taste one and I kept talking about how I wanted to try such a thing. Before I knew it, we pulled over on to the sidewalk and one of my colleagues (his name is Easy) hopped out of the van and motioned for me to follow him to a smiley stand. He told me to pick out the smiley that I wanted (there were about 25 to choose from) and the lady would warm it up in boiling water for me so we could eat it! She gave us our meal with some spices to put on top (mostly salt) and we hopped back into the bus to feast on our township ‘barbeque.’

Now, what I haven’t told you yet is that a smiley is actually A SHEEP HEAD!!!! Yes, you read that correctly, it is a sheep’s head that they shear and roast all afternoon over an open fire. They then split it in half with a giant butcher’s knife and you can pull apart the meat from the bones and have a nice meal. You pretty much eat everything that comes with the head too—the eyeball, the tongue, the ears, the chin—everything. So, after much grimacing and strange faces...yours truly experienced all the parts of a smiley! And surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad, I actually really liked it! The tongue was a pretty weird texture and I couldn’t really get over that, but everything else was delicious. I still can’t believe I actually ate one…it’s something I’ve ‘wanted’ to do for so long now and it actually happened—crazy! If someone offered to buy me one in the future, I don’t think I’d refuse J

All that was left of the sheep’s head was the bone by the time we reached our school—it was completely clean! Clean is a relative term though…I smelled like greasy meat for the rest of the afternoon, but that was okay because the remainder of my day was spent trying to learn how to play cricket with some kids in a sandy field. After an hour of them attempting to teach me how to bat, how to score, how to bowl, when to run, when NOT to run, etc…I’ve concluded that cricket takes more than an afternoon to even know what is going on. I gave the kids a good laugh when I kept running to the other set of wickets when I shouldn’t have-ha! I think it’s safe to say that what started out as a pretty rough day, turned out to be an exciting afternoon full of new experiences.